What is the duty of Germany, as well as of every civilized Christian nation, in face of the Armenian massacres? We must do all we can to preserve the lives of the 500,000 Armenian women and children who may now [beginning of 1916] be still in existence in Turkey and who are abandoned to starvation--to preserve them from a fate which would be a disgrace to the whole civilized world. The hundreds of thousands of deported women and children, who have been left lying on the borders of the Mesopotamian desert, or on the roads which lead there, will not be able to preserve their miserable existence much longer. How long can people support life by picking grains of corn out of horse dung and depending for the rest upon grass? Many of them will be beyond help on account of the underfeeding, which has continued for many months, and of the attacks of dysentery which are so prevalent. In Konia there are still a few thousand Armenians alive--educated people from Constantinople, who were in easy circumstances before their deportation, physicians, authors, and merchants; help for them would still be possible, before they succumb to the fate that threatens all. There are still 1,500 healthy Armenians--men, women and children, including grandmothers 60 years old and many children of six and seven--who are at work breaking stones and shovelling earth, on the part of the Bagdad Railway between Eiran and Entilli, near the big tunnel. At the present moment Superintendent Engineer Morf, of the Bagdad Railway, is still providing for them, but their names too have already been registered by the Turkish Government. As soon as their work is completed, that is to say, probably in two or three months, and they are no longer wanted, "new homes will be assigned to them"--which means that the men will be taken away and slaughtered, the good-looking women and girls will find their way into the harems, and the others will be driven about in the desert without food, until the end comes. The Armenian people has a claim to German help. When a few years ago massacres of Armenians threatened to break out in Cilicia, a German warship appeared off Mersina. The commander called on the Armenian "Katholikos" in Adana and assured him that as long as there was any German influence in Turkey, massacres tike those perpetrated under Abdul Hamid would be impossible. [32] The same assurance was given by the German Ambassador von Wangenheim [since deceased] at an audience given to the Armenian Patriarch and the President of the Armenian National Council in April, 1915.