“Some were sold into shame before the march began. ‘One Moslem reported that gendarmes had offered to sell him two girls for a medjikieh (about eighty cents).’ They sold the youngest and most handsome at every village where they passed the night; and these girls have been trafficked in hundreds through the brothels of the Ottoman Empire. Abundant news has come from Constantinople itself of their being sold for a few shillings in the open markets of the capital; and one piece of evidence in Lord Bryce’s possession comes from a girl no more than ten years old, who was carried with this object from a town of North Eastern Anatolia to the shores of Bosphorus. These were Christian women, as civilized and refined as the women of Western Europe, and they were enslaved into degradation.”[171] It was estimated that the exiles from three viliayets alone numbered about 600,000. “We believe there is imminent danger for the Sivas, Erzroom and Harpoot viliayets to be 600,000 will starve to death on the road. They took food for a few days, but did not dare take much money with them, as, if they did so, it is doubtful whether they would be allowed to keep it.” We must now follow the exiles on the way to death and destruction. In the following case the officers seem to think it not worth their while to drive so few away; and they may have been very poor: “Forty-five men and women were taken a short distance. The women were first outraged by the officers of the gendarmerie, and then turned over to the gendarmes to dispose of. According to this witness, a child was killed by having its brains beaten out on a rock. The men were all killed, and not a single person survived out of this group of forty-five. “The forced exodus of the last part of the Armenian population from a certain district took place on June 1st, 1915. All the villages as well as three-quarters of the town, had already been evacuated. An escort of fifteen gendarmes followed the third convoy, which included 4000 to 5000 persons. The prefect of the city had wished them a pleasant journey. But at a few hours’ distance from the town, the caravan was surrounded by bands of a brigand-tribe, and by a mob of Turkish peasants armed with guns, axes, and clubs. They first began plundering their victims, searching carefully even the very young children. The gendarmes sold to the Turkish peasants what they could not carry away with them. After they had taken even the food of these unhappy people, the massacre of the males began, including two priests, one of whom was ninety. In six or seven days all males above fifteen years of age had been murdered. “It was the beginning of the end. People on horseback raised the veils of the women, and carried off the pretty ones.”