“The camp Islahié itself is the saddest thing I have ever seen. Right at the entrance a heap of dead bodies lay unburied. I counted thirty-five; and in another place twenty-two; right close by were the tents of those people who were down with bad dysentery. In one single day the burial commission buried as many as 580 dead. For weeks many camps have been daily supplied with bread. Of course, everything has to be done as clandestinely as possible....”[179] An eye-witness at Aleppo says: “... On August 2 (1915), about eight hundred middle-aged and old women, accompanied by children under the age of ten years, arrived afoot from Diyarbekir, after forty-five days en route. They were in the most pitiable condition imaginable. They report the taking of all the young women and girls by the Kurds, the pillaging even of the last bit of money and other belongings and scenes of starvation, or privation, and hardship of every description. I am informed that 4500 persons were sent from Sughurt to Ras-el-Ain, over 2000 from Mezereh to Diyarbekir, and that all the cities of Bitlis, Mardin, Mosul, Severeh, Malatia, Besneh, etc., have been depopulated of Armenians; the men and boys, and many of the women killed and the balance scattered throughout the country.... The Governor of Der-el-Zor, who is now at Aleppo, says there are 15,000 Armenians in his city. Children are frequently sold to prevent starvation, as the government furnished practically no subsistence.” I quote the following from Toynbee: “We have a detailed account of what is happening at Der-el-Zor, from a particularly trustworthy source--the testimony of Fraulein Beatrice Rohner, a Swiss missionary from Basle. Fraulein Rohner has personally witnessed the sufferings of the Armenians at Der-el-Zor, and has published her description of them in the ‘_Sonnenaufgang_’ (Sunrise), the organ of the ‘Deutscher Hilfsbund für Christliches Liebeswerk in Orient’ (German League of Help for Work of Christian Charity in the East). Here are some extracts from her narrative: “At Der-el-Zor, a large town in the desert, about six days’ drive from Aleppo, we saw a big khan, all the rooms, the roof and the verandahs of which were crowded with Armenians, mostly women and children, with a few old men. They had slept on their blankets wherever they could find any shade.... For these mountaineers the desert climate is terrible. On the next day I reached a large Armenian camp of goatskin tents, but most of the unfortunate people were sleeping out in the sun on the burning sands. The Turks had given them a day’s rest on account of the large number of sick. It was evident from their clothing that these people had been well-to-do; they were natives of Geben, another village near Zeitoun, and were led by their religious head. It was a daily occurrence for five or six of the children of these people to die by the wayside.