And yet I would willingly have gone so far for the benefit of the Turks, in spite of their terrible guilt towards this people, as perhaps to keep my own counsel on the subject, if it had merely been a case of the execution of some hundreds under martial law or the carrying out of other measures--such as deportation--against a couple of thousand Armenians and these strictly confined to men. It is even possible that Europe and America would have pardoned Turkey for taking even stronger steps in the nature of reprisals or measures of precaution against the male inhabitants of that part of Armenia Proper which was gradually becoming a war zone. But from the very beginning the persecutions were carried on against women and children as well as men, were extended to the hundred thousand inhabitants of the six eastern vilajets, and were characterised by such savage brutality that the methods of the slave-drivers of the African interior and the persecution of Christians under Nero are the only thing that can be compared with them. Every shred of justification for the Turkish Government in their attempt to establish this as an "evacuation necessary for military purposes and for the prevention of unrest" entirely vanishes in face of such methods, and I do not believe that there is a single decent German, cognisant of the facts of the case, who is not filled with real disgust of the Young Turkish Government by such cold-blooded butchery of the inhabitants of whole districts and the deportation of others with the express purpose of letting them die _en route_. Anyone with human feelings, however pro-Turkish he may be politically, cannot think otherwise. This "evacuation necessary for military purposes" emptied Armenia Proper of men. How often have Turks themselves told me--I could mention names, but I will not expose my informants, who were on the whole decent exceptions to the rule, to the wrath of Enver or Talaat--how often have they assured me that practically not a single Armenian is to be found in Armenia! And it is equally certain that scarcely one can be left alive of all that horde of deported men who escaped the first massacres and were hunted up hill and down dale in a state of starvation, exposed to attacks by Kurds, decimated by spotted typhus, and finally abandoned to their fate in the scorching deserts of Northern Mesopotamia and Northern Syria. One has only to read the statistics of the population of the six vilajets of Armenia Proper to discover the hundreds of thousands of victims of this wholesale murder.