On the night of April 13th, 1909, these mutinous soldiers did rise and fall upon their officers. They killed some of them and imprisoned others; then they marched into the streets, and went over to Stamboul, and took possession of the House of Parliament. The president of parliament and the minister of justice escaped with their lives, but other ministers fell by the assassins’ bullets. Sultan Hamid’s success, however, was transient. Within a week the Young Turks rallied and hastened their forces from Albania and Macedonia, some 45,000 men well equipped with artillery, ammunition, and provisions. On the 23d of April the commander of the Young Turkey army heard a rumor that Sultan Abdul Hamid in disappointment and rage had planned on the following day a general massacre of Christians and his opponents. General Mohammed Shevket Pasha, the commander, moved his army in the afternoon and night of the same day.
One division occupied the old city, Stamboul, and the other division marched around the Golden Horn and moved upon Pera, the European quarter (on the 24th). Here the defenders of Abdul Hamid showed considerable resistance and a severe battle followed, but by night the mutinous soldiers were defeated, and the Young Turkey army surrounded the hill of Yildiz, situated three-quarters of a mile from the shore of the Bosphorus and separated from Pera by a valley. He was deposed from caliphate by the Sheikh-ul-Islam. He was dethroned by a resolution of Parliament. On the morning of the 27th, the sultan, seeing that there was no more hope for him, surrendered. “The bodyguard was marched out and new troops were sent in. That night several young officers went to the palace of the sultan and summoned him to their presence. He came in, pale as a sheet, trembling like a leaf, and begging for his life. He was told that his life would be spared, but that for the good of the country he must leave the city that night. The Young Turks dealt mercifully with the cruel monarch and allowed him to choose, as his companions in exile, eleven women, one child, two eunuchs, and five servants. These were placed in carriages, and after midnight were driven to the railway station in Stamboul. From here they were sent by a special train to Salonica, three hundred miles west, and were consigned to a strong house prepared for him.”[150] This ended the career as a ruler of Abdul Hamid, who was distinguished for his cruelty, perfidy, and infamy.
On the same day (the 13th of April, 1909) that the mutiny took place in Constantinople, the Mohammedans of the city and province of Adana, fell upon the Christian inhabitants, and within a few days, they killed the people and looted and plundered their property. The massacres were committed in the following places: Adana, Alexandretta, Marash, Mersina, Hadjin, Kessab, Zeitoon, Kirikon, and all the villages. The number of the killed was estimated from 25,000 to 50,000. And those who suffered from diseases and starvation exceeded 150,000.
The following is an extract from a letter written by Mrs. Doughty Wylie, wife of the British Consul at Adana. It was published in the London Daily Mail:
“We are having a perfectly hideous time here. Thousands have been murdered—25,000 in this province they say; but the number is probably greater, for every Christian village is wiped out. In Adana about 5,000 have perished. After Turks and Armenians had made peace, the Turks came in the night with hose and kerosene and set fire to what remained of the Armenian quarter. Next day the French and Armenian Schools were fired. Nearly every one of the Armenian Schools perished, anybody trying to escape being shot down by the soldiers.
“The Turkish authorities do nothing except arrest unoffending Armenians, from whom by torture they extort the most fanciful confessions. Even the wounded are not safe from this injustice. For fiends incarnate commend me to the Turks. Nobody is safe from them. They murder babies in front of their mothers, they half murder men, and violate the wives while the husbands are lying there dying in pools of blood. The authorities did nothing, and the soldiers were worse than the crowd, for they were better armed. One house in our quarter was burned with 115 people inside. We counted the bodies. Soldiers set fire to the door and as the windows had iron bars, nobody could get out. Every one in the house was roasted alive. They were all women and children and old people.”
The following is a portion of a letter, by Stephen Van R. Trowbridge. It describes the condition of Kessab and the surrounding villages after the butchery:
“Kessab was a thrifty Armenian town of eight thousand inhabitants, situated on the landward slope of Mt. Cassius (Arabic, Jebel Akra) which stands out prominently upon the Mediterranean seacoast, half way between Alexandretta and Latakia. Kessab is now a mass of blackened ruins, the stark walls of the churches and houses rising up out of the ashes and charred timber heaped on every side. What must it mean to the five thousand men, women, and little children who have survived a painful flight to the seacoast and now returned to their mountain homes sacked and burned! There were nine Christian villages which cloistered about Kessab in the valleys below. Several of them have been completely destroyed by fire. All have been plundered and the helpless people driven out or slain.”
One more witness of the crimes committed against humanity and Christianity may suffice. Rev. Dr. Christie, the President of St. Paul’s Institute, Tarsus, wrote:
April 24th, 1909.—“I doubt if ever a massacre equal in atrocities to this has been known in history.... Among the wounded there are multitudes of men, women and children; we hear of a pastor and his family, seven people burned together in their house; hosts of young women have been assaulted and carried away to harems, and their names changed to Moslem ones. Christian villages like Osmanieh, Baghchi, Hamidieh, Kara Tash, Kristian Keoy, Kozolook, have people in each, eighty or so are left, nearly all women and children. It is the same in the chiftliks (farms); there are hundreds of these on this wide and fertile plain; in every one that we have heard of in the neighborhood of Tarsus or Adana there has been unsparing slaughter of the Christian workers, even the Greeks and Syrians dying as martyrs with the Armenians.