Six hundred thousand men, women and children died within a year. There was recently held in New York City a Preparedness Parade, which marched up Fifth Avenue twenty abreast and took about thirteen hours to pass a given point. From 10 a.m. till well into the evening, this great army of over 125,000 continued to tramp up the street. If the Armenian men, women and children who died in Turkey within a twelvemonth should rise again and march in solemn procession to beg the assistance of the American people for their surviving brothers, the procession would not be 125,000, but 600,000, four times as long. Marching twenty abreast it would take two days and two nights to pass Great Reviewing Stand.
The mortality was higher in some regions than in others. From certain Armenian villages in the neighbourhood of Harpout, whose population was about two thousand, only 15·2 per cent. reached the goal of their deportation. Even if we make generous allowance for the number of men from these villages who may be still alive in the Army, and for the women and children who may have saved their lives by becoming Moslems, the mortality is unspeakably high. From other regions perhaps 25 per cent. have reached their goal, after marching hundreds of miles across the mountains down into the hot plains. From those portions of Asia Minor which are so situated that the Railway could assist in the deportation, the percentage of loss of life was far smaller, though here insufficient food and insanitary concentration camps have swollen the tolls of death. Especially from the cities on or near the coast of Cilicia, namely, Mersina, Tarsus and Adana, the deportation did not involve great loss of life. The Armenian inhabitants of Constantinople and of Smyrna, who really live in those cities and had not recently moved thither from the country, have not been deported.
Consequently the total number of surviving Armenians in Turkey is greater than our Committee had feared. The fact that there are more survivors than we at first believed obliges us to enlarge our relief work till it becomes adequate to the crisis.
2. The Needs of the Survivors.
Mr. W.W. Peet, Business Agent and Treasurer of the four Turkish Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions with headquarters at Constantinople, has sent information, received by the State Department on the 17th March, to the effect that there are at least eight hundred thousand refugees in Turkey who need help. One-half or more of these are reported by the American Consul at Aleppo to be in the districts of Damascus, Zor and Aleppo.
The general direction of deportation has been to force the exiles to go by train or on foot to the neighbourhood of Aleppo, whence they have been distributed in two directions. One of these is the region served by the Hidjaz Railway, built a few years ago to meet the needs of the Moslem pilgrims to Mecca. The station of Ma’an, near the ruins of the ancient city of Petra, the point beyond which the Hidjaz Railway has always declined to transport Christians, is the southernmost point where Armenian exiles are to be found.
The other territory to which large numbers of exiles have been deported is the region of Der-el-Zor on the Euphrates, six days’ journey east-south-east of Aleppo. The Armenians have had to walk thither from Aleppo, though some of them struck across by a more direct route from the Armenian cities on the north.
(Here follow, in the original, Documents 139(d) and 14 of this volume.)
Fortunately, the American Consul at Aleppo, Mr. Jackson, has the co-operation of the German Consul, Mr. Roessler in the work of relief.
Certain members of the American Committee have for months felt great anxiety as to the condition of the nearly 500,000 exiles distributed to the region east and south of Aleppo. Details as to their condition have been hard to secure. Now we know what we had suspected before—that many exiles have only grass to eat and that hundreds are dying daily of starvation.