“It is worthy of record that the dead bodies of Christians were dragged naked out of the towns and villages, horribly mutilated, and then cast out in heaps on the streets, or on dung-hills, or thrown into streams and drains, till asses and Jews were requisitioned to carry the corpses away like the carrion of dead animals. Among the mass of mutilated human flesh no one was able to recognize his own dead. When the dead bodies were not left as food for dogs, or when they were not burned with petroleum, a hole was dug into which they were thrown in a mass. But to men of importance special funeral honors were paid. The priest Mattheas of Busseyid, had his head cut off and placed between his legs, and the young Turks of the town amused themselves by flogging the body. The priest, Der-Harutiun of Diarbekir, and his colleague from the church at Alipunar, together with ten other priests from the district of Tadem, had the skin flayed from their bodies. A special monument was erected to the Abbot Sahag, prior of the monastery of Surp Katch in the district of Kizan, and to his young assistant; their skins were stuffed with straw and hung on trees. The Turks of Arabkir with an imagination worthy of Nero set up the heads of Armenians in rows on long poles, and the commander of the gendarmes at Baiburt, who, on the 26th of October, received from the women of the village of Ksauta five hundred pounds sterling in money and jewels as a ransom for the lives of their husbands and who, a few days later, changed his mind, and collecting together in a field the women and children of the village, had them all pitilessly slaughtered, is worthy of being chief of Tamerlane’s bodyguard. “At the beginning of the disturbance the inhabitants of twelve villages north and west of Marash fled for refuge to the town of Turnus with the intention of escaping from thence to the mountains near Zeitoun. About four thousand of them were suddenly one morning surrounded by soldiers. A terrible butchery began, and all were slain except three hundred and eighty women and children; these were collected together and driven by the soldiers for two days like a flock of sheep to Marash. The government of the sultan must show how merciful it could be to the innocent, even though these unfortunate women were obliged in the month of December to wade through the mountain snow, and to leave many of their starving children by the wayside, as no halt was permitted. One mother tells us that when she could not carry her two children any longer, she put them on a horse that belonged to the soldiers, and at the next river the little ones were thrown into the water. Would it not have been more merciful to have slain all the 4000 together?