Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
their bodies, horribly mutilated, were left in the valley, where they
were devoured by wild beasts. After completing this destruction, the
peasants and gendarmes gathered in the local tavern, comparing notes and
boasting of the number of “giaours” that each had slain. In Trebizond
the men were placed in boats and sent out on the Black Sea; gendarmes
would then come up in boats, shoot them down, and throw their bodies
into the water.
When the signal was given for the caravans to move, therefore, they
almost invariably consisted of women, children, and old men. Anyone who
could possibly have protected them from the fate that awaited them had
been destroyed. Not infrequently the prefect of the city, as the mass
started on its way, would wish them a derisive “pleasant journey.”
Before the caravan moved the women were sometimes offered the
alternative of becoming Mohammedans. Even though they accepted the new
faith, which few of them did, their earthly troubles did not end. The
converts were compelled to surrender their children to a so-called
“Moslem Orphanage,” with the agreement that they should be trained as
devout followers of the Prophet. They themselves must then show the
sincerity of their conversion by abandoning their Christian husbands and
marrying Moslems. If no good Mohammedan offered himself as a husband,
then the new convert was deported, however strongly she might protest
her devotion to Islam.
At first the Government showed some inclination to protect these
deporting throngs. The officers usually divided them into convoys, in
some cases numbering several hundred, in others several thousand. The
civil authorities occasionally furnished ox-carts which carried such
household furniture as the exiles had succeeded in scrambling together.
A guard of gendarmerie accompanied each convoy, ostensibly to guide and
protect it. Women, scantily clad, carrying babies in their arms or on
their backs, marched side by side with old men hobbling along with
canes. Children would run along, evidently regarding the procedure, in
the early stages, as some new lark. A more prosperous member would
perhaps have a horse or a donkey, occasionally a farmer had rescued a
cow or a sheep, which would trudge along at his side, and the usual
assortment of family pets, dogs, cats, and birds, became parts of the
variegated procession. From thousands of Armenian cities and villages
these despairing caravans now set forth; they filled all the roads
leading south; everywhere, as they moved on, they raised a huge dust,
and abandoned débris, chairs, blankets, bedclothes, household utensils,
and other impediments, marked the course of the processions. When the
caravans first started, the individuals bore some resemblance to human
beings; in a few hours, however, the dust of the road plastered their
faces and clothes, the mud caked their lower members, and the
slowly-advancing mobs, frequently bent with fatigue and crazed by the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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