Shabin-Karahissar, nearly 5,000 Armenians, for twenty-seven days without interruption, in the same month of July, kept busy another division of Turkish troops with their artillery. There took place one of the most tragic and heroic episodes of the present war. When the ammunition of the Armenians was almost gone, on the last day of the struggle, nearly 3,000 Armenian women and girls drank poison and died in order not to fall alive into the hands of the savage Turks. If the supply of poison had not given out, all the women would have done likewise. An eye-witness, one who had taken part in the struggle and who succeeded in reaching the Caucasus in 1916, after wandering in the mountains and valleys of Armenia for a whole year, related how on that last day Armenian mothers and girls, with tears in their eyes and with hymns on their lips, received poison from the Armenian physicians and apothecaries for themselves and their little ones. When the supply of poison gave out, those who were unable to obtain any uttered terrible wailing, and many of the girls cast themselves down from the rocks of the Karahissar citadel and committed suicide. [Illustration: DRO The commander of the second battalion of Armenian volunteers.] These events reveal the following facts: first, that in spite of all the precautions which the Turkish government employed to disarm the Armenians before carrying out its fiendish design, the Armenians found means to organize in the four corners of Armenia hopeless but serious plans of resistance against the swords of their enemy; second, that in order to eliminate these Armenian points of resistance during the summer of 1915, five Turkish divisions and tens of thousands of Kurds were kept employed, and were unable to add their immediate co-operation in those very days to the other Turkish forces engaged in their two offensives on the Caucasian front. These were the positive services which the martyred Armenian people rendered to the allied cause in the Near East. Their active resistance to the Turco-German plans, however, cost the Armenians more than one million men massacred under the most savage conditions, and the deprivation of their means of livelihood in Turkish Armenia. But, to complete the description of the Armenian Calvary, it is necessary to picture also in a few words the attitude assumed by the government of the Russian Czar toward the very Armenian people whose active participation on Russia's side enabled the Caucasian front to repulse the Turkish attacks in 1914 and 1915, and, moreover, to accomplish definite successes during the following year, 1916. ATTITUDE OF RUSSIAN CZARISM TOWARD THE ARMENIANS