“As soon as the men left us the Turkish drivers began to rob the women, saying, ‘You are all going to be thrown into the Tokma Su, so you might as well give your things to us and then we will stay by you and try to protect you.’ Every Turkish woman that we met said the same thing. The worst were the gendarmes, who really did more or less bad things. One of the schoolgirls was carried off by the Kurds twice, but her companions made so much fuss that she was brought back. I was on the run all the time from one end of the company to the other.... “As we approached the bridge over the Takma Su, it was certainly a fearful sight. As far as the eye could see over the plain was this slow-moving line of ox-carts. For hours there was not a drop of water on the road and the sun poured down its very hottest. As we went on, we began to see the dead from yesterday’s company and the weak began to fall by the way. The Kurds working in the fields made attacks continually and we were half-distracted. I piled as many as I could on our wagons, our pupils, both boys and girls, worked like heroes. One girl took a baby from its dead mother and carried it until evening. Another carried a dying woman until she died. I counted forty-nine deaths, but there must have been many more. One naked body of a woman was covered with bruises. I saw the Kurds robbing the bodies of these not yet entirely dead.... “The hills on each side were white with Kurds who were throwing stones on the Armenians, who were slowly wending their way to the bridge. I ran ahead and stood on the bridge in the midst of a crowd of Kurds until I was used up.... After crossing the bridge, we found all the Sivas people who had left before us, waiting by the river, as well as companies from Samsoun (a city on the Black Sea), Amasia, and other places. “My friends here (in Malatia) are very glad to have me with them, for they have a very difficult problem on their hands, and are nearly crazy with the horrors they have been through here. The mutessarif and other officials here and at Sivas have again and again read me orders from Constantinople to the effect that the lives of these exiles are to be protected, and from their actions I should judge that they must have received such orders;[174] but they certainly have murdered a great many in every city. Here there were great trenches dug by the soldiers (for the purpose beforehand) for drilling purposes. Now these trenches are all filled up, and our friends saw carts going back from the city by night. A man I know told me that when he was out to inspect some work he was having done, he saw a dead body which had evidently been pulled out of one of these trenches, probably by dogs.... The Beledieh Reiz here says that every male over ten years old is being murdered, that not one is to live, and no woman over fifteen.”[175]