The second act was far more diabolical and hellish than the first, because it was not an instant death by shooting or knocking on the head with an axe, or sabring, or throwing boat-loads of human beings into the sea. It was death by starvation, by rape, by disease and by a slavery far worse than all. By what process was this to be accomplished? By deportation.
By the help of the sultan, who marshaled his hosts against Heaven, of whom John Milton wrote centuries ago, the arch fiends at Constantinople hatched out this plan of deportation of the entire Armenian population to Mesopotamia, a distance of from 300 to 700 miles away from the Armenian communities. Orders came from the central government at Constantinople to the local authorities in the provinces of Asia Minor and Armenia. “These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet was too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers that every Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for an unknown destination. There were no exceptions for the aged, the ill, the women in pregnancy. Only rich merchants and bankers and good-looking women and girls were allowed to escape by professing Islam; and let it be said to their everlasting honor that few availed themselves of this means of escape.”
There were several reasons for the scheme of deportation: one of them was the helpless women, children, the ill and the aged men were still menacing the safety of the empire! Another, and the most fundamental reason was the government’s determination to get rid of the Armenians so as to get rid of the Armenian question once for all. Still another reason was that the homes of the Armenians were wanted in advance. The Moslem refugees from Macedonia must be settled in the provinces which were occupied by the Armenians. Another reason was to show how the association of the Turk with the highly cultured and civilized nation, the German, had mollified the brutal heart of the Turk, who did not, and would not massacre the defenseless women, children, the ill, the aged men—for such stories are “fabrications!”
We reproduce a few instances of these stories which the Turkish Ambassador—it may be the German too—declares are “fabrications, no women and children have been killed.”
“We are shocked at the cruelties perpetrated in these massacres. Trenchant pens have portrayed the horrors. Even some Germans have been found to denounce these massacres and to accuse the infamous ally of the Teutonic kaisers of the most terrible cruelties. Witness the following narrative which I quote from the November, 1915, issue of the Allegemeine Missione Zeitschrift, published in Berlin.
“‘A gendarme related to us, in such details as to make us shudder, how the Turks had maltreated a group of women and children, who were driven into exile. They slaughtered the Armenians without any hindrance. Each day ten or twelve men are hurled down into the ravines. They crush the skulls of those children who are too weak to walk.
“‘One day, early, we heard the procession of those doomed victims. Their misfortune was indescribable. They were in absolute silence—the young and old, even grandfathers advancing under such burdens as even their asses could hardly carry. All were to be chained together and then precipitated from the highest summit of a steep rock into the torrent of the Euphrates river. This froze our hearts. Our gendarme tells us that he had driven from Mama-Khatoun a similar group of people, composed of 3000 women and children, who were exterminated.
“‘On the 30th day of May, 674 Armenians were embarked in 13 sloops on the Tigris. Gendarmes were in each embarkation. These sloops departed towards Mosul. On the way the gendarmes threw all the unfortunates into the river, after having robbed them of their money and clothing. They kept the money and sold the clothing in the markets.
“‘An employee of the Bagdad railway related that the Armenians were imprisoned wholesale in the dungeons of Biredjik to be thrown into the Euphrates river at night. The corpses washed on to the river banks became a prey for dogs and vultures.’
“What law of retaliation could ever account for such abominable crimes? And moreover, what price must be exacted for the crimes of Kultur in Belgium, France, Serbia and Armenia?”[168]