World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, Turkish
Englishmen don’t like Armenians. I don’t myself. Turks loathe them.
Greeks dislike them. In the Caucasus the Georgians hate them. This
almost universal unpopularity is no excuse at all for massacre, but--in
Turkey--it helps to explain it. Where the European avoids, the Turk,
having a different standard, slays. To him they are vermin. Here is a
story told by an Armenian woman to a British officer. It is the story of
a “good Turk”; the expression was the woman’s, not the officer’s. There
was a batch of Armenian women and girls driven on until their drivers
grew weary that they would not die. Sick at heart they grew of the
perpetual driving of these weeping creatures. There were no pretty ones
left, for the most comely will lose their pitiful beauty when starved
long enough. So there was no interest left in being their custodians.
The drivers grew to hate the work, for there was no end to it, and no
reward. So they were herded together and slain. But two survived, a
woman and her daughter. They hid among the corpses and remained there
until the corpses began to crawl. The corpses of their friends and
relations. They had to leave that place, and in great fear they stole
away by night. There were a few Turkish villages not far away, and in
the morning they met a Turk. This was the good Turk of the story. He
stopped them and asked who they were, and they told him. “Come with me,”
he said to the girl, “and I will feed you.” So the girl followed him to
his house, and the mother followed too, though she was not invited. They
reached the house and the Turk went inside. He came out with his gun. “I
do not want the old woman,” he said, as he shot her. But to the girl he
gave food, and did not ill-treat her, for he was a good Turk.
Why do these people hate the Armenians so much?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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