“The Armenians of Urfa, seeing the fate which had befallen their compatriots from other districts, refused to leave their city and offered resistance. Thereupon no less a person than Count Wolf von Walfskehl ordered the town to be bombarded, and after the surrender of 1000 Armenian men he had not the power to prevent their being massacred.”[182]
The poor refugees are on the move all the time, from privation to starvation, from pest-hole to pest-hole. We quote the following from two different quarters of the country which tell the same tale:
“The Turk, if he is now asked what he is doing with the Armenians, simply replies, he is deporting them. The town of Kessab has been completely emptied.... All had been deported to places where they are sure to die, even the Home was not exempt this time, the government ordering the deportation of the children to Aleppo. This was protested against but the protest amounted to little, and the children were finally taken on a four days’ wearisome journey over mountain and valley to Aleppo, one of our workers (Miss Louisa Stahl) accompanying them that far, and paying sufficient money to a native pastor to look after them while she returned to Kessab to talk over matters with the others.
“Some time afterwards it was learned that the dear pastor in whose hands the money was entrusted was not permitted by the authorities to have anything to do with the children, and they were transferred to the building in which they were housed to another building where they were sure to be infested with disease, and this so happened, and the majority of them [about 36 out of 39] succumbed to the privations and to death.”[183]
“The misery and hopelessness of the situation are such that many are reported to resort to suicide. In illustrating the methods employed, report is made of the gathering of a group of one hundred children whom they placed in care of an educated young widow from ——. Two weeks later these children were deported, and from two survivors found further down the caravan route it was learned that the rest had perished. The house-mother, crazed by this treatment of her charges, was among the deported who were moving on. Boatloads sent from —— down the river, arrived at ——, —— miles away, with three-fifths of the passengers missing. There appears, in short, a steady policy to exterminate these people, but to deny charge of massacre. Their destruction from so-called natural causes seems decided upon.”[184]
In conclusion, let us state a few facts: The extermination of two millions of innocent, “loyal to a fault,” Christian subjects of the Sultan of Turkey was planned at, and ordered from, Constantinople. This crime has been committed. The young Turks have proved themselves unfit to rule even under a constitution. The Turkish government has forfeited its right to exist as a government. She has been weighed and found wanting. The Young Turks would not have dared to commit this awful crime, if this horrible war had not been brought about. Even after the war broke out, they hesitated until they were dragged into the war. Then those who are responsible for this war, and those who dragged the Turkish government into the conflict, must share the crime of the Turk. Again, the governments which had the sole influence over the unspeakable Turk to stop him from his barbarities, but did not for fear of offending him, or for other consideration are accessories to his crime.
Again, in spite of the horrors of this World-War and the greatest calamity which ever fell upon the loyal and innocent Armenians, men, women, and children, there are some positive signs that the dawn of liberty is at hand. That soon will the morning light break upon the suffering humanity. There is the liberation of 175,000,000 Russians from the tyranny of autocracy. Here America’s inexhaustible sources of wealth and power, both material and moral, are also thrown against the Turco-Teutonic barbarism. That 100,000,000 peace-loving Americans finally have been forced by the enemies of mankind to declare by their leader and head, President Wilson: “We enter this War only where we are clearly forced into it, because there are no other means of defending our rights....
“It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful people into War—into the most terrible and disastrous of all Wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.
“But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.
“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”