As I am not writing the story of sieges and battles, I cannot describe in detail the numerous acts of individual heroism, the co-operation of the Armenian women, the ardour and energy of the Armenian children, the self-sacrificing zeal of the American missionaries--especially Dr. Usher and his wife and Miss Grace H. Knapp--and the thousand other circumstances that make this terrible month one of the most glorious pages in modern Armenian history. The wonderful thing about it is that the Armenians triumphed. After nearly five weeks of sleepless fighting, the Russian Army suddenly appeared, and the Turks fled into the surrounding country, where they found appeasement for their anger by again massacring unprotected Armenian villages. Dr. Usher, the American medical missionary, whose hospital at Van was destroyed by bombardment, is authority for the statement that, after driving off the Turks, the Russians began to collect and to cremate the bodies of Armenians who had been murdered in the province, with the result that 55,000 bodies were burned. I have told this story of the “revolution” in Van not only because it marked the first stage in this organised attempt to wipe out a whole nation, but because these events are always brought forward by the Turks as a justification of their subsequent crimes. As I shall relate, Enver, Talaat, and the rest, when I appealed to them on behalf of the Armenians, invariably instanced the “revolutionists” of Van as a sample of Armenian treachery. The famous “revolution,” as this recital shows, was merely the determination of the Armenians to save their women’s honour and their own lives, after the Turks, by massacring thousands of their neighbours, had shown them the fate that awaited them. CHAPTER XXIV THE MURDER OF A NATION The destruction of the Armenian race in 1915 involved certain difficulties that had not impeded the operations of the Turks in the massacres of 1895 and other years. In these earlier periods the Armenian men had possessed little power or means of resistance. In those days Armenians had not been permitted to have military training, to serve in the Turkish Army, or to possess arms. As I have already said, these discriminations were withdrawn when the revolutionists obtained the upper hand in 1908. Not only were the Christians now permitted to bear arms, but the authorities, in the full flush of their enthusiasm for freedom and equality, encouraged them to do so. In the early part of 1915, therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defence.