“The American missionaries have been forced, for fear of their lives, to take refuge in a boat on the Lake (of Van).... Their Christian charges have been subjected to the grossest treatment--crops cut and carried away, cattle killed, villages burnt, men murdered, and worst of all, women and even children violated. Churches afford no refuge for these wretched mortals. Ten who fled for safety into the church at Utch-Kilissa were there foully murdered.... Hundreds of Christian villages in Armenia, having been gutted and fired by these miscreants, are completely abandoned, and their inhabitants have fled for refuge into the Russian camps. Hordes of fanatics, led by Moolahs (learned), have joined the Turkish army. Their fury is daily fed by the exhortations and addresses of the priests, who have denounced the war as a menace to the Ottoman (Mohammedan) religion, and they are led to commit every conceivable excess against the defenseless Christians, whom they accuse of furnishing information to the enemy. Facts prove the reverse, for as yet not a single Armenian spy has been discovered by the authorities, while several Kurds and Circassians, preferring money to-faith, have paid for their treachery with their lives; in short every spy hanged during this war has been a Mohammedan.... “Outrages on Mohammedans, being against the Koran, are visited with great severity; outrages against Christians, who are considered beyond the pale of the law, are left unnoticed. The massacre at Bayazid, the desecration of Russian graves, mutilation of corpses, violation of a flag of truce, and the recent cruelties towards the Christians at Van, all furnish excuses, and valid excuses, too, for a continuance of the war. We cannot hope that a great power like Russia will sit quietly down under the reverses her arms have sustained during the past month, and will permit the Christians, on whose behalf she has ostensibly made war, to be treated in Armenia as they were last year in Bulgaria. She must compel the Porte, by force of arms, to respect the rights of all her Christian subjects, and afford to them equal protection and privilege as to Mohammedans. At present this is far from being the case, Mussulman officials literally treating them worse than the dogs which act as scavengers in their streets. I mean this as no mere figure of speech, but as an actual fact, borne out not only by what I myself have witnessed, but also by reports of occurrences which have come under the notice of many of the American missionaries in Armenia, who daily receive complaints from their Christian congregations of the cruelties and acts of oppression they endure at the hands of the Kurds, whom the Ottoman government have now let loose in Anatolia.”[126]