For some time the Turks had been constructing entrenchments around the Armenian quarter and filling them with soldiers, and, in response to this provocation, the Armenians began to make preparations for a defence. On April 20th a band of Turkish soldiers seized several Armenian women who were entering the city; a couple of Armenians ran to their assistance and were shot dead. The Turks now opened fire on the Armenian quarters with rifles and artillery; soon a large part of the town was in flames and a regular siege had started. The whole Armenian fighting force consisted of only 1,500 men; they had only 300 rifles and a most inadequate supply of ammunition, while Djevdet had an army of 5,000 men, completely equipped and supplied; yet the Armenians fought with the utmost heroism and skill. They had little chance of holding off their enemies indefinitely, yet they knew that a Russian Army was fighting its way to Van, and their utmost hope was that they would be able to defy the besiegers until these Russians arrived.
As I am not writing the story of sieges and battles, I cannot describe in detail the numerous acts of individual heroism, the co-operation of the Armenian women, the ardour and energy of the Armenian children, the self-sacrificing zeal of the American missionaries—especially Dr. Usher and his wife and Miss Grace H. Knapp—and the thousand other circumstances that make this terrible month one of the most glorious pages in modern Armenian history. The wonderful thing about it is that the Armenians triumphed. After nearly five weeks of sleepless fighting, the Russian Army suddenly appeared, and the Turks fled into the surrounding country, where they found appeasement for their anger by again massacring unprotected Armenian villages. Dr. Usher, the American medical missionary, whose hospital at Van was destroyed by bombardment, is authority for the statement that, after driving off the Turks, the Russians began to collect and to cremate the bodies of Armenians who had been murdered in the province, with the result that 55,000 bodies were burned.
I have told this story of the “revolution” in Van not only because it marked the first stage in this organised attempt to wipe out a whole nation, but because these events are always brought forward by the Turks as a justification of their subsequent crimes. As I shall relate, Enver, Talaat, and the rest, when I appealed to them on behalf of the Armenians, invariably instanced the “revolutionists” of Van as a sample of Armenian treachery. The famous “revolution,” as this recital shows, was merely the determination of the Armenians to save their women’s honour and their own lives, after the Turks, by massacring thousands of their neighbours, had shown them the fate that awaited them.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE MURDER OF A NATION
The destruction of the Armenian race in 1915 involved certain difficulties that had not impeded the operations of the Turks in the massacres of 1895 and other years. In these earlier periods the Armenian men had possessed little power or means of resistance. In those days Armenians had not been permitted to have military training, to serve in the Turkish Army, or to possess arms. As I have already said, these discriminations were withdrawn when the revolutionists obtained the upper hand in 1908. Not only were the Christians now permitted to bear arms, but the authorities, in the full flush of their enthusiasm for freedom and equality, encouraged them to do so. In the early part of 1915, therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defence.
The operations at Van disclosed that these men could use their munitions to good advantage. A similar “rebellion” at Zeitoun also proved that these despised merchants and traders of the Empire possessed energetic fighting power. It was thus apparent that an Armenian massacre this time would generally assume more the character of warfare than those wholesale butcheries of defenceless men and women which the Turks had always found so congenial. If this plan of murdering a race was to succeed, two preliminary steps would therefore have to be taken: it would be necessary to render all Armenian soldiers powerless and to deprive of their arms the Armenians in every city and town. Before Armenia could be slaughtered, Armenia must be made defenceless.
In the early part of 1915 the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish Army were reduced to a new status. Up to that time most of them had been combatants, but now they were all stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen. Instead of serving their countrymen as artillerymen and cavalrymen, these former soldiers now discovered that they had been transformed into road labourers and pack animals. Army supplies of all kinds were loaded on their backs, and stumbling under the burdens, and driven by the whips and bayonets of the Turks, they were forced to drag their weary bodies into the mountains of the Caucasus. Sometimes they would have to plough their way, burdened in this fashion, almost waist-high through snow. They had to spend practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground—whenever the ceaseless prodding of their taskmasters gave them an occasional opportunity to sleep. They were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped, their Turkish oppressors perhaps stopping long enough to rob them of all their possessions—even of their clothes. If any stragglers succeeded in reaching their destinations they were not infrequently massacred. In many instances Armenian soldiers were disposed of in even more summary fashion, for it now became almost the general practice to shoot them in cold blood. In almost all cases the procedure was the same. Here and there squads of fifty or a hundred men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village. Suddenly the sound of rifle-shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp. Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes. In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims’ sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.
Let me relate a single episode which is contained in one of the reports of our Consuls and which now forms part of the records of the American State department. Early in July 2,000 Armenian “amélés”—such is the Turkish word for soldiers who have been reduced to workmen—were sent from Harpoot to build roads. The Armenians in that town understood what this meant and pleaded with the Governor for mercy. But this official insisted that the men were not to be harmed, and he even called upon the German missionary, Mr. Ehemann, to quiet the panic, giving that gentleman his word of honour that the ex-soldiers would be protected. Mr. Ehemann believed the Governor and assuaged the popular fear. Yet practically every man of these 2,000 was massacred, and his body thrown into a cave. A few escaped, and it was from these that news of the massacre reached the world. A few days afterward another 2,000 soldiers were sent to Diarbekir. The only purpose of sending these men out in the open country was that they might be massacred.
In order that they might have no strength to resist and to escape by flight, these poor creatures were systematically starved. Government agents went ahead on the road, notifying the Kurds that the caravan was approaching and ordering them to do their congenial duty. Not only did the Kurdish tribesmen pour down from the mountains upon this starved and weakened regiment, but the Kurdish women came with butchers’ knives in order that they might gain that merit in Allah’s eyes that comes from killing a Christian. These massacres were not isolated happenings; I could detail many more episodes just as horrible as the one related above. Throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.
Dreadful as were these massacres of unarmed soldiers, they were mercy and justice themselves when compared with the treatment which was now visited upon those Armenians who were suspected of concealing arms. Naturally, the Christians became alarmed when placards were posted in the villages and cities ordering them to bring all their arms to headquarters. Since this order applied only to Christians, the Armenians well understood what the result would be should they be left defenceless while their Moslem neighbours were permitted to retain their arms. In many cases, however, the persecuted people patiently obeyed the command, and then the Turkish officials almost joyfully seized their rifles as evidence that a “revolution” was being planned, and threw their victims into prison on a charge of treason. Thousands failed to deliver arms simply because they had none to deliver, while an even greater number tenaciously refused to give them up, not because they were plotting an uprising, but because they proposed to defend their own lives and their women’s honour against the outrages which they knew were being planned.