At Tchai I saw perhaps a couple of thousand in the same condition. Here the men and women were together, and the Turks had not succeeded in carrying off more than two girls. By keeping constant guard the Armenians, although unarmed, had been able to frighten the assailants away. They said that all the men there would die rather than give up any of their women, and that, as the Turks were not so numerous, they felt safer, but dreaded what was awaiting them when the order came to move on. A heavy rain had fallen at Tchai and occasioned great suffering, followed by sickness and some deaths, especially among the children. A good many of the people had gone insane.
A conductor on the train told me that, although the order had come for the return of the Protestants and the Catholics, he had seen about 100 to 150 of the latter from Ismid re-deported towards Angora and in this direction, even after they had gone through the form of having been returned to their homes. In their second deportation they were to be scattered—a few to each Turkish village in the region.
At Q. about the same conditions exist, although we are fortunate in having a good Vali. However, he is much handicapped by some powerful men of the Committee,[[150]] who are opposed to him and accuse him of undue clemency. Even a prominent Armenian of this city warned him not to be too kind lest he be sent away (the above was an Armenian connected with the railway, and therefore not deported). The Protestants here are very grateful to you for securing them exemption from deportation. However, they are in much distress, for the Government has sealed up all their shops and will not let them conduct any business, so that what little cash they have is rapidly being exhausted.
All of the above and much that I might add is as nothing, however, to what the railway employees report as going on at the end of the line, where the people leave the railway and set out on foot, only to be set upon by brigands, who rob, outrage and kill all the way from Bozanti to Adana and beyond. At Angora also there has been great slaughter, according to all reports.
Whether these unfortunate people are sent on towards the east or whether they remain where they are along the road, their future is very dark, and it means annihilation for the whole race unless they can be quickly reinstated in their homes with permission to carry on their business, or else taken out of the country altogether. Even if they are left just as they are, two or three months will probably see the end of most of them. The climate of the interior is very different from that of Constantinople, and the nights are already cold. We shall do the best we can here, but can hardly touch the outer edge of the national wretchedness and misery, which is written so clearly on the despairing faces of the people, especially of the women and girls, that enquiry and investigation are almost unnecessary to confirm the horrible truth. We are using every means we can, however, to see as much as possible ourselves and get reliable information of the rest....
P.S.—I have had to wait several days to find a suitable messenger, and the delay has enabled me to get a pretty comprehensive view of the situation. There are at present in Q. about 5,000 to 10,000 Armenian refugees, mostly from the Broussa, Ismid and Bardezag regions; a few hundreds come from Eski Shehr, Ak Shehr and other places nearer by. The people are, for the most part, encamped in the fields near the railway station, much as they are at the places above described. The protection is, for the most part, very flimsy, and there is a considerable proportion of the people whose things have been stolen from them and who are simply lying out in the open with no protection from the scorching sun by day or from the dew and dampness by night. This state of affairs produces a vast number of cases of malaria and dysentery, and also of heat prostration, and one cannot walk a few paces through the camp without seeing sick lying everywhere, especially children. There are, of course, no sanitary arrangements at all, and last night the stench that came from the camp was overpowering. Conditions are ripe for an epidemic at any time, especially as these people have not, like the soldiers, received any prophylactic treatment. Until very recently the Government had done absolutely nothing for the refugees; during the last few days they have been giving the adults one piastre[[151]] and the children twenty paras[[152]] a day, which is, of course, insufficient to feed them adequately. The people have no occupation and stand and lie about listlessly; a steady stream of them passes up and down the main street, begging or peddling their small remaining stock of clothing, rugs, embroidery, &c. At night the people are not molested as much as they were at first, but this is probably due chiefly to the fact that the best of everything has been taken away from them by this time and that a vast assemblage of sickly and half-starved people is naturally comparatively safe from molestation. There are a fair proportion of the Armenians who have managed to keep some money and goods, and who are fairly comfortable for the time being in houses and rooms that they rent. These, however, have troubles of their own, for the police try to get money out of them by frightening them, saying that they are next on the list to be sent off to Bozanti, that their papers are made out wrong, &c. Numbers of anxious parents have been to us, beseeching us to take their daughters as nurses or servants in order to protect them from the Turks. We have employed as many as we dared—not that we are afraid for ourselves, but that we have to think of our own regular nurses and employees, who would be in danger if we overstepped the mark. But it is terrible to refuse asylum to girls whom we know to be in danger. Yesterday an unusually pretty and refined young girl of fifteen was brought to us by her parents; she had been pursued all the way from Broussa by an Army officer, but they had been able to elude him and the police as well. Our hospital is too public to shelter her, and we are still looking for a place for her. Most of the people in town are scared to do anything at all, foreigners included, but we do not propose to show the white feather, and are only waiting for certain official persons to return from P., where they went a few days ago in order to get larger liberties for Red Cross activities. At present our hospital has taken in all the soldiers and refugees that it can, and we are seeing sick refugees in the clinic all day long. To-day I counted 21 women and children in one of our waiting-rooms, mostly lying on the floor from sheer exhaustion, one child moribund, two others nearly so, and half the rest of the group quite likely to die in a few days, if they are allowed to remain where they are in the camp. Many of the villagers are mountaineers, and, lying out on the hot dusty plain by day and exposed to the cold of night, they quickly succumb. To-day I took a little girl into the hospital who had been perfectly well until four days ago, when everything was stolen from the mother and she had no place to lay her except on the ground, so that she quickly got up a dysentery and died a few hours after admission to the ward. The family were respectable Protestant people from Ismid. Hardly had the little girl died and the sheets been changed than another child, this time a boy, was put into the same bed; his leg had been cut off by a railway-truck and apparently there was nobody to take care of him. We found that the mother had been forcibly separated from her children further back on the road. In that same ward lies a young girl who has recently had her leg amputated for the same accident, and who to-day was crying and screaming because some friends had told her that her parents had suddenly been deported to P. without having been given a chance to see her. It is all horrible, horrible—no mere description can adequately portray the awful suffering of these unfortunate people, whose only crime is that they are Armenians.
If a few of the men have had revolutionary ideas, I am convinced that the vast majority of them have had no more idea of rising against the Government than have their helpless wives and children. The suffering we see is utterly unlike anything confronting the Americans in Constantinople. Sad as is the lot of many of the poor soldiers, they at least have the comfort of kindness and sympathy, and the realisation that the enemy is sharing the same lot. But these people are being deliberately done to death at a sufficiently slow pace to allow their oppressors the opportunity of choosing out such of their women and their goods as they care for and getting all their money away from them before they die. Dr. and Mrs. D. went through the massacres of ’94 and ’96, and they and Miss H. and I have been through two revolutions, one massacre and two wars since then, but we all agree that we have never seen anything like this. Another outrageous side of it is that many of the fathers and brothers of these women and children are in the Army, fighting the country’s battles. Such was the case with the dying child that was brought to the clinic this afternoon, and with another who will probably be in the same condition soon.
In addition to the medical work, we have begun distributing bread and fruit at the hospital twice a day, and a few quilts to those who are most needy. But this is very inadequate, and we hope to get the Government’s permission to keep a large number of the sick in the city under our supervision with a couple of Armenian physicians to assist us. Many of the people had heard of the offer of transportation to America some time before I came here, and sigh that it might be realised. Unless political circumstances allow of their speedy restoration to their homes or their bona fide establishment in new places, transportation to America seems their only hope, or else the nation will be annihilated, and that very soon....
[150]. Of Union and Progress.