“... The next day we heard that a special Kaimakam had come to Hassan Chalebe to separate the men.... But we encamped and ate our supper in peace, and even began to think that perhaps it was not so, when the mudir came around with gendarmes and began to collect the men, saying that the Kaimakam wanted to write their names and that they would be back soon.
“The night passed, only one man came back to tell the story of how every man was compelled to give up all his money, and that all were taken to prison. The next morning they collected the men who had escaped the night before and extorted forty-five lires....
“Broken-hearted, the women continued their journey. ... The mudir said the men had gone back to Sivas. The villagers whom we saw all declared that all those men were killed at once....
“As soon as the men left us the Turkish drivers began to rob the women, saying, ‘You are all going to be thrown into the Tokma Su, so you might as well give your things to us and then we will stay by you and try to protect you.’ Every Turkish woman that we met said the same thing. The worst were the gendarmes, who really did more or less bad things. One of the schoolgirls was carried off by the Kurds twice, but her companions made so much fuss that she was brought back. I was on the run all the time from one end of the company to the other....
“As we approached the bridge over the Takma Su, it was certainly a fearful sight. As far as the eye could see over the plain was this slow-moving line of ox-carts. For hours there was not a drop of water on the road and the sun poured down its very hottest. As we went on, we began to see the dead from yesterday’s company and the weak began to fall by the way. The Kurds working in the fields made attacks continually and we were half-distracted. I piled as many as I could on our wagons, our pupils, both boys and girls, worked like heroes. One girl took a baby from its dead mother and carried it until evening. Another carried a dying woman until she died. I counted forty-nine deaths, but there must have been many more. One naked body of a woman was covered with bruises. I saw the Kurds robbing the bodies of these not yet entirely dead....
“The hills on each side were white with Kurds who were throwing stones on the Armenians, who were slowly wending their way to the bridge. I ran ahead and stood on the bridge in the midst of a crowd of Kurds until I was used up.... After crossing the bridge, we found all the Sivas people who had left before us, waiting by the river, as well as companies from Samsoun (a city on the Black Sea), Amasia, and other places.
“My friends here (in Malatia) are very glad to have me with them, for they have a very difficult problem on their hands, and are nearly crazy with the horrors they have been through here. The mutessarif and other officials here and at Sivas have again and again read me orders from Constantinople to the effect that the lives of these exiles are to be protected, and from their actions I should judge that they must have received such orders;[174] but they certainly have murdered a great many in every city. Here there were great trenches dug by the soldiers (for the purpose beforehand) for drilling purposes. Now these trenches are all filled up, and our friends saw carts going back from the city by night. A man I know told me that when he was out to inspect some work he was having done, he saw a dead body which had evidently been pulled out of one of these trenches, probably by dogs.... The Beledieh Reiz here says that every male over ten years old is being murdered, that not one is to live, and no woman over fifteen.”[175]
Miss Graffam’s letter was dated Aug. 7, 1915, at Malatia; not a word has been heard from the company of 2000 exiles, whom she so heroically defended until her separation from them near Malatia. The author’s sister and brothers, and their families were in this company. The probability is that all have perished by this time, if not massacred soon after their guardian angel left them.
FOOTNOTES:
[168] The New Armenia, May 15, 1916, New York; the article The Martyrdom of Armenia, by Paul Perrin.