Crowds of Zeitoun people, sent away from Sultania, went on to-day towards BM. I fear they go to death. Between 600 and 700 have died already of hardship and illness.
I made some Bairam calls on Turks and was well received, but one cannot be at all sure of the heart of any one these days.
Have just returned from the priest’s house. I went to get a girl’s story. The girl was a day-pupil of Miss V.’s[[157]] at X., about fifteen years old. Officers came to many houses and said they were to be exiled, but school-girls were to be excepted, and they took the girls “back to school;” not to their own school, though, but to a Turkish barracks, where they were on exhibition and chosen as the property of certain officers. This girl was claimed by one; the others, over a hundred, were carried in automobiles to Constantinople. Fifteen of them were this girl’s friends. This girl was brought here with exiles from somewhere. She refused the attentions of the officer claiming her. The priest heard of her and went to investigate. The officer complained that not one smile had she ever given him. The priest said she would never smile on him, and left him to think over-night on the matter. In the morning he said he didn’t want her against her will. The priest secured the girl, and the officer has gone his way on to Aleppo. The priest can’t afford to keep her, and I have written to the BV. school about her. Perhaps we here can raise 10 liras for her and send her to school. She left her mother two months ago. Her family were exiled at once.
W., X.’s sister and her child were here an hour ago, en route from the north (where the Zeitoun people were first sent). She tells dreadful tales. What will be the end of it all? The streets are full of exiles begging for bread. —— and relatives are all here, and Partani’s sister. I am buying ——’s bed to lighten her luggage and fill her purse. She tells of babies left to die on the roadside, as the mothers could carry them no longer. Many tell me this.
A young man from —— was just in. Two hundred and fifty families are en route from there. The city swarms with exiles, and many are at ——.
19th August.
Our —— boys and families are also in the procession. The Nigdé people have begun to move on from here. The Adapazar people are à la franca and some of them very rich. Thirty more carriages from AE. last night.
Robberies are common, and girls carried off, and three Armenians killed at BY.
20th August.
The stream of arrivals continues to flow into B. The poor people on foot simply drop down utterly exhausted, and many are dying of hunger and fatigue. Three quite large children died in the Gregorian churchyard yesterday; another is badly off with smallpox; a middle-aged man there is dying. —— Hodja has been over there this morning to minister to him. A crowd of those ill were carried off to the Turkish hospital yesterday. —— and his family are still here from BV., waiting for the rest of his family—mother and brothers and their families. The advance line has arrived and tell him that his relatives lost almost everything from their homes. Plunderers threw their goods from the windows, and partners carried off rugs, bedding, &c. and some money they had. His brothers had been in prison.