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TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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STORY OF WALTER M. GEDDES

    "I LEFT here on the sixteenth of September, 1915, for Aleppo. I first saw the Armenians at Afion Karahissar where there was a big encampment— probably of ten thousand people—who had come down from the Black Sea. They were encamped in tents made of material of all descriptions, and their condition was deplorable."

    "The next place I saw them was at Konia, also a large encampment. There I saw the first brutality; I saw a woman and her baby separated from her husband; he was put on our train while she was forcibly held behind and kept from getting on the train."

    "The next place where there was a large encampment was at Osmanieh, where there was said to be about fifty thousand; their condition was terrible. They were camped on both sides of the railway track, extending fully half a mile on each side. Here they had two wells from whence they could get water, one of which was very far from the encampment, the other at the railway station platform. At daybreak, the Armenians came in crowds, women and children and old men, to get to the well to get water. They fought among themselves for a place at the well, and the gendarmes, to keep them in order, whipped several people. I saw women and children repeatedly struck with whips and sticks in the hands of the gendarmes. Later I had occasion to pass through the camp on the way to the town of Osmanieh and had an opportunity to see the condition of the people. They were living in tents like those above described and their condition was miserable. The site of the encampment had been used several times by different caravans of Armenians and no attempt at sanitation had been made by either the Turks or the Armenians themselves, with the result that the ground was in a deplorable condition, and the stench in the early morning was beyond description. At Osmanieh, they were selling their possessions in order to obtain money to buy food. One old man begged me to buy his silver snuff-box for a piaster in order that he might be able to buy some bread."

    "From Osmanieh, I traveled by carriage to Rajo and passed thousands of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They were going in ox-carts, on horseback, donkeys and on foot, the most of them children, women and old men. I spoke to several of these people, some of whom had been educated in the American Mission Schools. They told me that they had traveled for two months. They were without money and food and several expressed their wish that they could die rather than go on and endure the sufferings that they were undergoing. The people on the road were carrying with them practically all their household possessions and those who had no carts or animals were carrying them on their backs. It was not unusual to see a woman with a big pack wrapped up in a mattress and a little child a few months old on the top of the pack. They were mostly bareheaded, and their faces were swollen from the sun and exposure. Many had no shoes on, and some had their feet wrapped in old pieces of rags, which they had torn from their clothing."

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