Dreadful as were these massacres of unarmed soldiers, they were mercy and justice themselves when compared with the treatment which was now visited upon those Armenians who were suspected of concealing arms. Naturally, the Christians became alarmed when placards were posted in the villages and cities ordering them to bring all their arms to headquarters. Since this order applied only to Christians, the Armenians well understood what the result would be should they be left defenceless while their Moslem neighbours were permitted to retain their arms. In many cases, however, the persecuted people patiently obeyed the command, and then the Turkish officials almost joyfully seized their rifles as evidence that a “revolution” was being planned, and threw their victims into prison on a charge of treason. Thousands failed to deliver arms simply because they had none to deliver, while an even greater number tenaciously refused to give them up, not because they were plotting an uprising, but because they proposed to defend their own lives and their women’s honour against the outrages which they knew were being planned. The punishment inflicted upon these recalcitrants forms one of the most hideous chapters of modern history. Most of us believe that torture has long ceased to be an administrative and judicial measure, yet I do not believe that the darkest ages ever presented scenes more horrible than those which now took place all over Turkey. Nothing was sacred to the Turkish gendarmes; under the plea of searching for hidden arms they ransacked churches, treated the altars and sacred utensils with the utmost indignities, and even held mock ceremonies in imitation of the Christian sacraments. They would beat the priests into insensibility, under the pretence that they were the centres of sedition. When they could discover no munitions in the churches, they would sometimes arm the bishops and priests with guns, pistols, and swords, then try them before court-martials for possessing weapons against the law, and march them in this condition through the streets, merely to arouse the fanatical wrath of the mobs. The gendarmes treated women with the same cruelty and indecency as their husbands. There are cases on record in which women accused of concealing weapons were stripped naked and whipped with branches freshly cut from trees, and these beatings were even inflicted on women who were with child. Violations so commonly accompanied these searches that Armenian women and girls, on the approach of the gendarmes, would flee to the woods, the hills, or to mountain caves.