Source :
http://www.archive.org/details/themurderoustyra00toyniala
THE ARMENIAN ATROCITIES OF 1915.
Only a third of the two million Armenians in
Turkey have survived, and that at the price of
apostatising to Islam or else of leaving all they
had and fleeing across the frontier. The refugees
saw their women and children die by the roadside,
and apostacy too, for a woman, involved the
living death of marriage to a Turk and inclusion
in his harem. The other two-thirds were
»
deported
»
that is, they were marched away
16
from their homes in gangg, with no food or
clothing for the journey, in fierce heat and bitter
cold, hundreds of miles over rough mountain
roads. They were plundered and tormented by
their guards, and by subsidised bands of brigands,
who descended on them in the wilderness, and
with whom their guards fraternised. Parched
with thirst, they were kept away from the water
with bayonets. They died of hunger and exposure
and exhaustion, and in lonely places the
guards and robbers fell upon them and murdered
them in batches some at the first halting place
after the start, others after they had endured
weeks of this agonising, journey. About half
the deportees and there was at least 1,200,000
of them in all perished thus on their journey,
and the other half have been dying lingering
deaths ever since at their journey’s end ; for
they have been deported to the most inhospitable
regions in the Ottoman Empire : the malarial
marshes in the Province of Konia ; the banks of
the Euphrates where, between Syria and Mesopotamia,
it runs through a stony desert ; the sultry
and utterly desolate track of the Hedjaz Railway.
The exiles who are still alive have suffered worse
than those who perished by violence at the
beginning.
The murderous tyranny of the Turks , Toynbee . 1917
