“Ahmed Aga, who commanded the massacre, has since been decorated and promoted, to the rank of yus bashi (centurion).

“I am, sir, yours very truly,
“Eugene Schuyler.

“The Hon. Horace Maynard, etc.”[124]

It was in the following year, 1877, that Armenia witnessed new horrors. The correspondent of the London Times wrote of the massacre of the Armenians at Bayazid:

“The scene that ensued [the massacre] was one of unparalleled horror. The town contained one hundred and sixty-five Christian families, and all the men, women and children were ruthlessly put to the sword. A Turkish officer, who visited the town a few days subsequently, states that there was not a single inhabitant left.... In every house he entered small groups of dead were lying shockingly mutilated, and in the most revolting, indecent positions. Captain McCalmont, who visited the place shortly after the Russian relief, states that it is entirely deserted and a mere heap of ruins; also that soldiers were employed for six days in burying the dead, the number of whom it was impossible to estimate.”[125]

“The American missionaries have been forced, for fear of their lives, to take refuge in a boat on the Lake (of Van).... Their Christian charges have been subjected to the grossest treatment—crops cut and carried away, cattle killed, villages burnt, men murdered, and worst of all, women and even children violated. Churches afford no refuge for these wretched mortals. Ten who fled for safety into the church at Utch-Kilissa were there foully murdered.... Hundreds of Christian villages in Armenia, having been gutted and fired by these miscreants, are completely abandoned, and their inhabitants have fled for refuge into the Russian camps. Hordes of fanatics, led by Moolahs (learned), have joined the Turkish army. Their fury is daily fed by the exhortations and addresses of the priests, who have denounced the war as a menace to the Ottoman (Mohammedan) religion, and they are led to commit every conceivable excess against the defenseless Christians, whom they accuse of furnishing information to the enemy. Facts prove the reverse, for as yet not a single Armenian spy has been discovered by the authorities, while several Kurds and Circassians, preferring money to-faith, have paid for their treachery with their lives; in short every spy hanged during this war has been a Mohammedan....

“Outrages on Mohammedans, being against the Koran, are visited with great severity; outrages against Christians, who are considered beyond the pale of the law, are left unnoticed. The massacre at Bayazid, the desecration of Russian graves, mutilation of corpses, violation of a flag of truce, and the recent cruelties towards the Christians at Van, all furnish excuses, and valid excuses, too, for a continuance of the war. We cannot hope that a great power like Russia will sit quietly down under the reverses her arms have sustained during the past month, and will permit the Christians, on whose behalf she has ostensibly made war, to be treated in Armenia as they were last year in Bulgaria. She must compel the Porte, by force of arms, to respect the rights of all her Christian subjects, and afford to them equal protection and privilege as to Mohammedans. At present this is far from being the case, Mussulman officials literally treating them worse than the dogs which act as scavengers in their streets. I mean this as no mere figure of speech, but as an actual fact, borne out not only by what I myself have witnessed, but also by reports of occurrences which have come under the notice of many of the American missionaries in Armenia, who daily receive complaints from their Christian congregations of the cruelties and acts of oppression they endure at the hands of the Kurds, whom the Ottoman government have now let loose in Anatolia.”[126]

I have quoted a long passage from Mr. Norman’s book to show the miserable condition of the Armenians who were treated worse than the street-dogs by the Mohammedans, the officers and the rest, and that these outrages were well known in England, yet in the following year, “England at the Berlin Congress, and England alone—for none of the other powers took any interest in the matter—destroyed the security which Russia had extorted from the Turkish government at San Stefano, and substituted for the sterling guarantee of Russia, the worthless paper money of Ottoman promises.”[127]

Mr. Norman himself wrote: “Naturally, since I have been here (in Armenia) I have had many, very many, opportunities of conversing with Turkish officers and men on the so-called Eastern question; and the consequence is that, arriving in the country a strong philo-Turk, deeply impressed with the necessity of preserving the ‘integrity of the Empire’ in order to uphold ‘British interests,’ I now fain would cry with Mr. Freeman, ‘Perish British interests, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike a blow on behalf of the wrong against the right.’”[128] England, however, did strike a fatal “blow on behalf of the wrong against the right,” in the negotiations of 1878, when Lord Beaconsfield “substituted the Treaty of Berlin for the Treaty of San Stefano, and dictated the provisions of the Anglo-Turkish convention.”