Massacre of Armenians at Erzeroum 422 Burying the Bodies After the Massacre at Erzeroum 431 A Grim Corner of the Cemetery, Erzeroum 438 The Prison at Erzeroum 444 Trebizond 453 Principal Street and Bazaars of Erzeroum 459 Town and Citadel of Van 466 Armenian Refugees at the Labor Bureau at Van 475 MAPS. Map of Turkey in Asia 284-285 Map of Armenia 321 INTRODUCTION. At no time of the world's history have there ever been two months so rich in grand tragedy as the Armenian period of November and December, 1895. It is not the enormous number of the killed nor the frightful suffering of the survivors that give this period its unique character, but the fact that the great majority of the 75,000 or more of the massacred Christians had a free choice to make between life and death, and they chose death. Civilized humanity is bound to take a supreme interest in the action of those heroes and heroines who sacrificed all the interests of existence to their moral ideal of life,--in those women who, in order to escape from the outrage of a bestial soldiery, threw themselves into the river Euphrates and were drowned,--in those virgins who, captured by the brutal Moslems, received twenty, thirty sword cuts in defending their honor,--in those men who, when threatened with instant death if they would not embrace Islam, answered, "we are ready to be immolated for the love of Christ," and they were slaughtered like sheep. The historian and the dramatic writer, the poet and the painter will soon follow the diplomatist and the journalist to take up the matter, and the Christian peoples of all lands will continue to receive now a thrill of pious admiration, now a tremendous shock at the recital of these events. In fact, the Armenian occurrences have two sides, one glorious, and one of hellish darkness. They bring out in the most striking fashion, the infernal genius of the Mahommedan religion. The Moslems, high and low, exhibited such foul sensuality, such satanic cruelty and such delight in ferocity of which even the savages are incapable. And these qualities are precisely those which Mohammedanism cultivates.