“In Baiburt the destroyers were merciful enough in fourteen houses to burn the babies with their mothers. Ohannes Avakian, a rich civilian of Trebizond, offered the raging mob all his possessions if they would spare his family and himself. His three-year-old child was in his arms. Both were murdered before the eyes of the mother and the other children, and then the crowd seized the spoil. A valiant Turk thinks nothing of strangling children on the knees of their mothers. To play at ball with a baby, and toss it from one bayonet to another before its mother’s eyes seemed pleasant sport for the soldiers of Bitlis.... Although it is a fact that dozens of women and children perished in all the massacres, that in Kiauta and Lessouk a hundred women were mutilated, and amongst the victims at Bitlis were little boys (from five to twelve years of age) of the Church School of Surp Serkis, we must do the Turk the justice to acknowledge that these cruelties were not _invariably_ approved by the head officials.... The populace went beyond their actual instructions when we find that amongst the 450 corpses buried in the cemetery at Sivas all the women had been mutilated. As a rule, however, the authorities did nothing to check the bloodthirstiness of the masses, and whenever the work of murder was too great for the people alone, the soldiers were speedily summoned to help. “Many of the fleeing Armenians were simple enough to believe that their Churches would be a place of safety; that in the sanctuary they would be spared. But as hundreds of churches and convents had to be reduced to ashes, since the _aim was to do away with every trace of the hated Christian faith_, what mattered the trifling fact that men, women, and children were inside them? In Ressuan the doors of the church were broken open and all the refugees murdered. Three hundred Armenians escaped to the monastery of Maghapayetzatz only to be butchered with the brotherhood. In Indises (district of Luk-Shehri) and in Habusu (district of Harpoot) the churches were burned over the heads of the Christians; but here we cannot blame the people for the soldiers set the example. In Shabin Kara Hissar more regard was paid to the church, the two thousand people who had taken refuge there were at least killed outside the doors....