We have traced in brief the backward progress of Ottoman domination, and have seen how, from the rough and ready methods of a military barbarism, the Turks evolved a more emphatic and a more highly organised negation of all those principles which we may sum up under the general term of civilisation. The comparatively humane neglect of the unfortunate alien peoples herded within the frontiers of earlier Sultans was improved upon by Abdul Hamid, who struck out the swifter and superior methods of maintaining the dominating strength of the Turkish element in the kingdom not by the absorption of subject peoples, but by their extermination. This in turn, this new and effective idea, served as a first sketch of an artist with regard to his finished picture, and starting with that the Nationalist party enlarged and elaborated it into that masterpiece of massacre which they exhibited to the world in the years 1915 and 1916 of the Christian Era, when from end to end of the Empire there flashed the signal for the extermination of the Armenian race. Abdul Hamid was but tentative and experimental as compared to their systematised thoroughness, but then the Nationalist party had learned thoroughness under the tutelage of its Prussian masters. And in addition to instruction they had had the advantage of seeing how Prussian firmness, with the soothing balm of Kultur to follow, had dealt with the now-subject remnant of Belgians. That was the way to treat subject people: 'the first care of a state is to protect itself,' as Enver and Talaat could read in the text-books now translated into Turkish, in copies, maybe, presented to them by their Master in Berlin, and Turkey could best show the proof of her enlightenment and regeneration, by following in the footsteps of Prussian Kultur. Perhaps a few thousand innocent men might suffer the inconvenience of having their nails torn out, of being bastinadoed to death, of being shot, burned or hanged, perhaps a few thousand girls and women might die by the wayside in being deported to 'agricultural colonies,' might fall victims to the lusts of Turkish soldiers, or have babes torn from their wombs, but these paltry individual pains signified nothing compared to the national duty of 'suffering the state to run no risks.' As one of this party of Union and Progress said, 'The innocent of to-day may be the guilty of to-morrow,' and it was therefore wise to provide that for innocent and guilty alike there should be no to-morrow at all. Years before the statesmanship of Abdul Hamid had prophetically foreseen the dawning of this day, when he remarked 'The way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians,' and temporarily for twenty years he did get rid of the Armenian question. But when, in 1915, Talaat Bey completed his arrangements for a further contribution to the solution of the same problem, he said, 'After this, there will be no Armenian question for fifty years.' As far as we can judge, he rather under-estimated the thoroughness of his arrangements.[2]
Lately (September 1917), when the massacres were all over, Talaat, speaking at a Congress of the Committee of Union and Progress, upheld as right and proper the treatment of the Armenian race.
The race thus marked out for extermination was one of the oldest settlements in Asiatic Turkey. Originally it was confined to Armenia proper, a highland district comprising part of what is now the Russian province of Trans-Caucasia, part of Persia, notably the province of Adarbaijan, and, within the Turkish frontier, the province of Armenia, itself. According to legend, which may well be correct, the Armenians were the oldest national Christian Church in the world, with a liturgy that dates from the first century of the Christian Era, while their translation of the Bible dates from the early years of the fifth century A.D. Here in these uplands they formed a compact and homogeneous population, spread over towns and country alike, and were occupied in the main with agrarian and pastoral pursuits. But they had in addition much of the versatility and business capacity of the Jews, as well as a strong liberal-mindedness towards progress and education, and thus, while they still continued up to the present day their pastoral life in the countryside, others gravitated towards towns, and by degrees they spread over a large part of the Turkish Empire, until most of the towns in Turkey had a progressive and peaceful quota of Armenian citizens, tolerated by their Moslem neighbours, and, though possessed of no great share of political influence, powerful, in that the trade and commerce of inland Turkey was largely in their hands. Wherever they went they established their schools; many were lawyers, doctors, and professors of education. Certain repressive measures were brought to bear on them; they were not, for instance, allowed to carry arms, except when, in accordance with Turkish conscriptive laws, they served in the Ottoman army. But many of them, by paying their exemption money, got off military service, and they confined themselves to the arts of peace, whether pastorally in their native highlands, or in the shops and offices of the towns to which they migrated. They were not, till the time of Abdul Hamid, held to be in any sense a national danger, for, except in Armenia proper, they were too scattered and too peace-loving an element of the population to be capable of united action, and never do they seem to have provoked any outburst of Moslem fanaticism. They had local quarrels and fights with the more warlike Kurds who encroached on Armenia, and in the towns where they settled they often incurred the vague jealousy and dislike which are the penalties of a race superior morally and intellectually to those among whom they live. But that superiority constituted in course of time the 'Armenian question,' to which Abdul Hamid alluded. In all, some sixty years ago their entire race numbered about 4,000,000 persons, of whom about 1,250,000 inhabited Russian Trans-Caucasia, about 150,000 were in the province of Adarbaijan, and there were smaller bodies of them in Austria and India. The remainder, some 2,500,000, were spread over Armenia, over the villages and towns of Turkey, notably the eastern edge of the Cilician uplands, while in Constantinople itself there were certainly not less than 150,000, and probably as many as 200,000. To-day, the male portion of the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire has practically ceased to exist: a quarter of a million men and women escaped over the Russian frontier, five thousand escaped to Egypt, and there are a few thousand women and girls (it is impossible to ascertain the exact number) in Turkish harems. Turkism, as administered by Abdul Hamid first, then, far more efficiently, by Enver Pasha, and Talaat Bey, has solved the Armenian question.
The history of its solution falls under two heads, of which the first concerns the manner in which it was solved in Armenia itself, where the population was almost exclusively Armenian, both in towns and in the country. Here the eastern and north-eastern frontiers of Turkey, across which lie the province of Russian Trans-Caucasia and Persia, pass through the middle of districts peopled by men of Armenian blood, and when, in the autumn of 1914, the Turks made their entry into the European War, their eastern armies, operating against Russia, found themselves confronted by troops among whom were many Armenians, while in their advance into the Persian province of Adarbaijan, there were in the ranks of their opponents, Armenians and Syriac Christians. They advanced in fact, in the first weeks of the war, into a country largely peopled with men of the same blood as those on their own side of the frontier. Though the edict had not yet come from Constantinople for the massacre of the Armenians (Talaat Bey did not complete his arrangements till the following April), the slaughter of them began then, first in the advance of the Turkish armies, and following on that movement, which lasted but a few weeks, in their subsequent retreat before the Russians. All villages through which the Turkish armies passed were plundered and burned, all the inhabitants on whom the Turks could lay their hands were killed. Sometimes women and children were given to the Kurds, who formed bands of irregular troops in conjunction with the Turkish army, and these were outraged before they were slaughtered. A price was put on every Christian head, and in the Turkish retreat the corpses were thrust into the wells in order to pollute them. The excuse for this, as given by German apologists (not apologists, perhaps, so much as supporters and adherents of the policy), was that since behind the Turkish lines the country was populated by a race of the same blood as that through which they advanced, and then retreated, extermination was necessary in order to prevent or to punish treachery and collusion. But I have been nowhere able to find that there were instances of such, nor that the Turks put forward that excuse themselves. Indeed it would have been an unnecessary explanation, for but a few months after the opening of the war, Talaat Bey's plans were complete, and the extermination of Armenians hundreds of miles from any sphere of military operations rendered it needless to say anything about it, or to invent instances of treachery if there were actually none to hand.
Simultaneously the massacre of Armenians behind the Turkish lines began. The whole male population of the district round Bitlis was murdered, so too were all males in Bitlis itself. Then all women and children were driven in, as a herdsman might drive sheep, from the reeking villages round, and, for purposes of convenience, concentrated in Bitlis. When they were all collected, they were driven in a flock to the edge of the Tigris, shot, and the corpses were thrown into the river. That was the solution of the Armenian question in Bitlis.
North-west of Bitlis, and some sixty miles distant, lies the town of Mush. It used to contain about 25,000 Armenian inhabitants, and in the district round there were some three hundred villages chiefly consisting of Armenians. Arrangements were on foot for a general massacre there when the arrival of Russian troops at Liz, some fifteen hours' march away, caused the execution of it to be put off for a while, and up till July a few folk only had been shot, and a few beaten to death, as a warning to those treacherously inclined. Then the Russians, in the face of superior forces, had to retire again, and the massacres were put on a systematic footing. The account which follows is based on four independent authorities: (1) The statement of a German eye-witness in Mush in charge of an Armenian orphanage; (2) the statement of a woman deported from a village near, and subsequently killed by Kurds; (3) information from refugees escaped to Trans-Caucasia; (4) the journal Horizon of Tiflis. These supplement each other, often verify each other, and in no instance are contradictory.
Rumours of an impending massacre reached Mush before the end of 1914, at a time when the massacres across the frontier had begun. The Mutessarif of Mush, an intimate friend of Enver Pasha, had openly declared that 'at an opportune moment' the slaughter of the whole Armenian race was contemplated, and later Ekran Bey corroborated this in the presence of the American and German Consuls. Enver indeed seems to have been the chief organiser with regard to the massacres in Armenia itself, while Talaat Bey saw to the fate of those dispersed in towns throughout the rest of Turkey. During the whole of that winter, a very severe one, signs of the approaching extermination multiplied. In the villages round fresh taxes were introduced, and when Armenians were unable to pay they were beaten to death, while, if they resisted, the village in question was burned. But by July 1915 (after the unavoidable delay caused by the proximity of Russian troops) all was ready, and the massacre began in earnest.
Four battalions of Turkish troops arrived from Constantinople, and an order was given that all Armenians must leave the town within three days, after 'registering themselves' at the Government office. The women and children were to remain, but their money and their property would be confiscated. Within two hours after that, owing, I suppose, to fresh orders from Constantinople, the guns opened fire on the crowds in the streets flocking to the registry offices, and after that systematic house-to-house murder began. Prominent Armenians were tortured to death, houses containing women and children were set on fire, a body of men collected together was thrown into the river, girls were outraged and slaughtered. For two days the massacre continued, and by the end of the second day the Armenian question was solved as regards Mush.
In the surrounding villages the same Prussian thoroughness was observed, and out of all the inhabitants of the plain 5000 only seemed to have survived, who fled to Sasun (there to be subsequently massacred in 1916), while a few from outlying villages escaped to the Russian troops. In certain villages the girls and young women were given to the Kurd soldiery, who raped them publicly in the presence of their families, not sparing girls of eight and ten years of age, who then, bleeding and violated, were shot in company with the old women, for whom the Kurds (inspired by Allah, the God of Love) had no use. Elsewhere, as the story of a deported woman from Kheiban tells us, the women guarded by Kurdish troops were driven out of their villages, leaving behind the corpses of the men and of old women who could not walk, and for days were marched along the roads, nearly naked, under the fierce heat of the July sun. Once every other day they were given bread, but all did not get it, and many fell exhausted by the wayside, and were either whipped to their feet again or allowed to lie down and die. As they passed through villages Kurds would come out and rape a girl or two, and when they halted at night their guards would come among them.... Some few escaped; the rest, in dwindling company, went on through days of blinding sun and nights of shame till at last there were only a few remaining. It was not worth while going farther, for the work of Enver Pasha was nearly done, and the rest were pushed into the river. One alone survived, who could swim, and she, with her two-year-old baby on her back, got across the stream and made her way to a village where were a party of Armenians who had escaped massacre. She arrived there at midnight, and at first they thought she was a ghost. To them she told her story of the outraged and ever-dwindling caravan of helpless women and girls driven onwards all day beneath the smiting arrows of the sun, and encamped by the wayside, where they halted with their barbarous guards and their lusts for a terror by night. Of them none but this one was left, who had carried her baby with her every step of that infernal pilgrimage. Two days afterwards he died from want of nourishment, and before the week was out the mother fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, and was killed.