Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/redrugsoftarsusw00gibb THE RED RUGS OF TARSUS A Woman's Record of the Armenian Massacre of 1909 by HELEN DAVENPORT GIBBONS [Illustration] New York The Century Co. 1917 Copyright, 1917, by The Century Co. Published, April, 1917 TO The Memory of C. H. M. DOUGHTY-WYLIE, V.C. "THE MAJOR" OF THIS BOOK Who was killed in action leading a charge on Gallipoli Peninsula, April 29, 1915 PREFACE When I was a Freshman at Bryn Mawr I decided I should "write something." My girlhood was uneventful and joyous--the girlhood of the lucky American who has a wholesome good time. I knew I must wait for experience. I was too sensitive about my youth to expose what I was thinking, for fear "they" would know I was not grown up. The experiences I was looking for came. They were so painful that seven years passed before I put pen to paper. To-day, after the lapse of years, I am not sure that my perspective is good. In looking back upon those six weeks in Adana Province between April thirteenth and the end of May, nineteen-nine, they seem longer than all the rest of my life. The thought of publishing I rejected and rejected again. I avoided dwelling on that time the way one puts off going back to a house one has not entered since a loved one died. To this day we have lived up to an agreement made back in those days, and my husband and I have never told each other the worst we know about the atrocities committed by the Turks. But recent events in Armenia brought it all back again. My indignation, and a sense of duty and of pity, transcended all personal feelings. I lived again that night in Tarsus, when we--seven defenseless women, our one foreign man a brave young Swiss teacher of French, and 4,800 Armenians waited our turn at the hands of the Kurds. Massacres had begun again, a thousand times worse than before. Other American women were in the same untold peril that I had been. The whole Armenian people were marked for extermination. Now, as then, help had to come. But from where? What could I do? I could not go out there. I had my four babies. I had four hundred and fifty French soldiers' babies I had been mothering since the war began. I had no time to write a book, although the old Freshman ambition still existed. I had been waiting ever since my marriage in nineteen-eight for a quiet time to come when I could settle down and cultivate a literary instinct, but the chance never came. Our honeymoon had never finished--it hasn't yet. I had set up six homes in seven years. We had lived in Tarsus (Armenia), Paris, Constantinople, Paris again, Princeton (New Jersey), and then settled in Paris for the third time.