“The Turkish authorities do nothing except arrest unoffending Armenians, from whom by torture they extort the most fanciful confessions. Even the wounded are not safe from this injustice. For fiends incarnate commend me to the Turks. Nobody is safe from them. They murder babies in front of their mothers, they half murder men, and violate the wives while the husbands are lying there dying in pools of blood. The authorities did nothing, and the soldiers were worse than the crowd, for they were better armed. One house in our quarter was burned with 115 people inside. We counted the bodies. Soldiers set fire to the door and as the windows had iron bars, nobody could get out. Every one in the house was roasted alive. They were all women and children and old people.” The following is a portion of a letter, by Stephen Van R. Trowbridge. It describes the condition of Kessab and the surrounding villages after the butchery: “Kessab was a thrifty Armenian town of eight thousand inhabitants, situated on the landward slope of Mt. Cassius (Arabic, Jebel Akra) which stands out prominently upon the Mediterranean seacoast, half way between Alexandretta and Latakia. Kessab is now a mass of blackened ruins, the stark walls of the churches and houses rising up out of the ashes and charred timber heaped on every side. What must it mean to the five thousand men, women, and little children who have survived a painful flight to the seacoast and now returned to their mountain homes sacked and burned! There were nine Christian villages which cloistered about Kessab in the valleys below. Several of them have been completely destroyed by fire. All have been plundered and the helpless people driven out or slain.” One more witness of the crimes committed against humanity and Christianity may suffice. Rev. Dr. Christie, the President of St. Paul’s Institute, Tarsus, wrote: April 24th, 1909.--“I doubt if ever a massacre equal in atrocities to this has been known in history.... Among the wounded there are multitudes of men, women and children; we hear of a pastor and his family, seven people burned together in their house; hosts of young women have been assaulted and carried away to harems, and their names changed to Moslem ones. Christian villages like Osmanieh, Baghchi, Hamidieh, Kara Tash, Kristian Keoy, Kozolook, have people in each, eighty or so are left, nearly all women and children. It is the same in the chiftliks (farms); there are hundreds of these on this wide and fertile plain; in every one that we have heard of in the neighborhood of Tarsus or Adana there has been unsparing slaughter of the Christian workers, even the Greeks and Syrians dying as martyrs with the Armenians.