As we have already mentioned, from the beginning of the war the Russian bureaucracy tried on the one hand by various false promises to win over the sympathy of the Armenians, while on the other it tried by every means to keep the Armenian military forces away from the Caucasian front. Only seven battalions of Armenian volunteers were kept on the Caucasian front. As we have already seen, those few battalions even, in 1914 and 1915, rendered to the Russians invaluable services, twice saving the right and left wings of the Russian army from an unavoidable catastrophe by their heroic resistance; but the Russian official communiqués do not contain one line in which the battalions of Armenian volunteers are even mentioned. The same silence was maintained by the Russian communiqués concerning the heroic resistance of the Armenians at Van, and with regard to the assistance which the Armenian volunteers rushed to that city. This was the policy of the government of Russian Czarism from the beginning of the war to the end of its existence,--to avoid in every way speaking about the Armenians and Armenia. The Russian press was even forbidden to speak about the massacres carried on in Turkish Armenia at the hands of the Turkish government. Therefore, when the capture of Erzeroum in 1916 made the immediate co-operation of the Armenian volunteers unnecessary to the Russians, the commander-in-chief of the Caucasian army at the time, Grand Duke Nicolas Nicolaevitch, ordered the disbanding of all the battalions of the Armenian volunteers. Besides this amazing treatment of the Armenian military forces, the Czar's government removed from the Caucasus before the war all the Armenian officers and replaced them by generals (manifestly anti-Armenian in spirit) from the Russians, Georgians, and other Caucasian races. The object of this move was to enable the government to check the national aspirations of the Armenians, and to give it a plausible opportunity at the end of the war to take over the Armenian vilayets without gratifying the demands of the Armenians for autonomy. [Illustration: The civilian Armenians of Urfa who defended themselves against the Turks and the Kurds in July, 1915.]