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GIFT OF 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
The 
 Tragedy of Armenia 
 
 A Brief Study and Interpretation 
 
 BT 
 
 BERTHA S. PAPAZIAN 
 
 With an Introduction by Secretary James L. Barton, D.D. 
 of the American Board 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON CHICAGO 
 
*> *% 
 
 COPTRIGHT 1918 
 
 Bt BERTHA S. PAPAZIAN 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON 
 
TO THOSE 
 
 WHO COUNTED HONOR ABOVE LIFE 
 
 THE ARMENIAN DEAD 
 
 384451 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 This little book springs from my desire to 
 bring to the attention of my fellow Americans 
 the claims upon our sympathy and support of 
 a great little nation, which, at this critical 
 moment of world history, is making a supreme 
 effort for long-denied liberation. Armenia is 
 known to us chiefly through her sufferings. 
 With the other phases of her story we are 
 largely unacquainted. To appreciate fully 
 the justice of her appeal for complete emanci- 
 pation, we should know more of her character 
 and of the part she has played in the past, and 
 in the present war. I shall be happy if this 
 little book, in any degree, serves this end. 
 
 Bertha S. Papazian. 
 
 Cambridge, Mass- 
 October, 1918. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Armenian crucifixion at the hand of the 
 Turkish Government and with the approval 
 if not direct co-operation of Germany, has 
 touched the heart of humanity. The world 
 has witnessed one of the most ancient and 
 notable of all the races of history subject to 
 protracted attacks, atrocious beyond the power 
 of words to describe, with no conceivable 
 reason except to exterminate an entire people 
 whose chief offence was industry and whose 
 unforgivable crime the profession and prac- 
 tice of Christianity. 
 
 This story is the Armenian side of one of 
 the tragedies of ancient and modern history, 
 told simply, without passion and harrowing 
 details, and yet with directness and pathos 
 commanding our profoundest admiration. 
 
 It is one of the marvels of history that the 
 Armenian nation, swept with almost perpetual 
 war, persecution and massacre for many long 
 dark centuries, has retained its beautiful lan- 
 guage, its religion and its national soul, and 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 now in these days of race redemption is ready 
 to come into its own as a people worthy and 
 capable of self-determination. 
 
 The Armenians, by their loyalty and devo- 
 tion to the cause of the Allies in Russia, 
 Turkey, Persia and Palestine, as well as in the 
 armies of England, France and the United 
 States, cannot, without most flagrant display 
 of ingratitude, be ignored when the status of 
 the lesser nations is decided. 
 
 Belgium, by her heroic resistance to the 
 atrocious demands of Germany, saved Paris 
 and made the world her debtor; so Armenia, 
 refusing to cast in her lot with the Central 
 Powers in partnership with Islam, stood loyal 
 to the Allies and made it impossible for 
 Germany to consummate her designs in the 
 Caucasus and Eastern Turkey. 
 
 Serbia and Belgium have been martyr 
 nations for four years, Poland and Bohemia 
 for from one to three centuries; but Armenia 
 has been in virtual bondage for a jjipusand 
 years, during which period she has kept her 
 home fires burning, her hopes undimmed and 
 her soul unintimidated. Armenia lives today, 
 although bleeding and stricken, because she 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 was worthy. If this war ends and the final 
 peace treaties are written and the Peace 
 Congress dissolves without Armenia's obtain- 
 ing her independence from Moslem rule with 
 every opportunity for self-direction and self- 
 expression in quietness and safety, then this 
 war will in so far have been fought in vain. 
 
 We ask for the emancipation of Armenia 
 from the rule of the Turk and the Russian, 
 not because she has been for centuries en- 
 slaved, not because she has been afflicted as 
 few other nations have suffered, and yet has 
 persevered; not for pity or for sympathy's 
 sake, but in the name of justice and inherent 
 right to live as a free people. Tested in the 
 furnace of the centuries of affliction, and 
 weighed in the balance of national endow- 
 ments, Armenians have demonstrated their 
 inherent worth. From every point of view 
 and measured by every standard of national 
 capacity, they have a right to demand and 
 expect the support of the Allies in their claims 
 for national recognition. 
 
 This little book reveals the spirit and soul 
 of Armenia, the depths of the longing of that 
 ancient yet present living people, the height 
 
Xll INTRODUCTION 
 
 of their hopes and the earnestness of their 
 purpose. We have been accustomed to think 
 of the Armenians as a bleeding, stricken 
 nation, and to them our sympathies have 
 flowed in substantial expression. Let us now 
 think of them as rising from the ashes of 
 their persecution into a newness of life, and 
 with their loyalty to the eternal principles of 
 democracy, justice, righteousness and brother- 
 hood established, let us heartily welcome them 
 into the sisterhood of nations. America, 
 which for nearly a century has labored for 
 and suffered with them more than any other 
 western nation, should be the first to champion 
 their cause and pledge them its unchanging 
 allegiance and support. 
 
 James L. Barton. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAQE 
 
 Foreword vii 
 
 Introduction ix 
 
 I Pagan Days . . 1 
 
 II From the Conversion to the Cru- 
 sades 18 
 
 III Under Turkish Domination and the 
 
 Spiritual Renaissance 41 
 
 IV The Rise and Influence of the Near 
 
 Eastern Question 58 
 
 V After the Massacres 81 
 
 VI In the World War 100 
 
 VII In the World Court 128 
 
 Notes 149 
 
 Bibliography 159 
 
THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
Lift up thy head, weep not! Holy is grief, 
 And great and wholesome. Earth naught nobler 
 knows 
 
 Than is the victim brave beneath his cross. 
 'Tis in the shadow that the dawn-light grows. 
 
 The black destroyers, the red torturers 
 Shall vanish they like smoke shall disappear, 
 
 And from thine ashes thou shalt rise again, 
 
 Made young by suffering, radiant, bright and clear. 
 
 Thou shalt come forth triumphant from these shades; 
 
 Stars shall thine eyes become, and sparkle bright; 
 Thy wounds to radiant roses shall be changed, 
 
 And from thy whitened hair shall spring forth light. 
 
 Thou at the opening of the ways shall stand, 
 And break the bonds that held thee down in gloom. 
 
 Mother, rise! thy pains were childbirth pangs; 
 It is a world that stirs within thy womb! 
 
 From the " Lullaby for Mother Armenia " 
 
 By Archag Tchobanian. 
 
 (Translated into English by Alice Stone Blackwell) 
 
The Tragedy of Armenia 
 
 Chapter I 
 PAGAN DAYS 
 
 ALTHOUGH these are the days of action 
 rather than of reflection; although the 
 hurried massing of millions of men and 
 of billions of dollars, the building of immense 
 docks and factories and railroads and hospitals 
 and camps, of fleet upon fleet for sea and sky, 
 the marshaling of labor, the organizing of huge 
 civilian populations, the endless minutiae of 
 war, are taxing all the energies of mankind 
 to the uttermost, there is, at the same time, 
 an intensified thinking going on, often sub- 
 conscious, but more incisive and compelling 
 than any we have experienced in many a long 
 year. The ethical and intellectual laws about 
 which we had been feebly and abstractedly 
 debating have suddenly become as imperiously 
 real, as tangibly evident, as any demonstra- 
 tion in mathematics or physics. We know 
 that the war we are witnessing, in spite of 
 
2 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 its overwhelming material manifestations, is 
 nothing other than an immense moral up- 
 heaval; that it is the innermost become outer- 
 most; the word made flesh. And we are 
 forced to recognize the irresistible power of 
 Spiritual Law. 
 
 It is less difficult now than formerly to 
 present the claims of far-away Armenia. As 
 sharers in the same peril we are more ready 
 to listen and consider. We dare not, as be- 
 fore, flee with the cry upon our lips, "This is 
 too sad to talk about." We are eager to hear 
 all. "The greatest tragedy in all human 
 history" draws more and more near to us. 
 Especially when we realize, as more and more 
 we are coming to do, that this age-long 
 agony, from even the contemplation of which 
 the selfish world has shrunk, typifies in little 
 the present tremendous conflict between 
 Darkness and Light, and that it is the sub- 
 stratum and occasion, in a very real though 
 indirect and negative way, of the world 
 conflict. 
 
 To the tragedy of tragedies, only the Master 
 Craftsman could have designed such a climax 
 as this. A small and distant people, pitifully 
 
PAGAN DAYS 
 
 praying in the name of Liberty and Chris- 
 tianity for redemption from the foe of both, 
 appealing in the midst of massacre and devas- 
 tation to its treaty rights what diplomat 
 would believe that the neglect to heed could 
 entail such stupendous consequences? What 
 sovereign could foresee that as a result of mere 
 callous disregard of moral and treaty obliga- 
 tions, a new sanction would be given to inter- 
 national treachery, a new impetus to the 
 claims of tyranny; that the Kaiser would 
 seize the opportunity to make common cause 
 with the Sultan; that bargains would be 
 struck to neutralize the peril of international 
 interference, railroad concessions balancing 
 against murdered human beings, and banking 
 concessions against outraged womanhood, 
 pillage, and arson; that pan-Islamic, pan- 
 Turanian schemes would emerge into pros- 
 pect, flattered by the encouragement of a 
 European government which was in time to 
 reject all Christian and democratic philosophy 
 and to unite its creed of ruthlessness and brute 
 force to that of the Turk, the ancient arch- 
 enemy of all that we hold dear? 
 
 But the record is before us, and it is only 
 
4 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 in the light of the world conflagration that 
 we can learn its full import. All poetic 
 justice seems blind when compared with the 
 judgment which this light reveals. One reads 
 in profound sorrow mingled with admiration 
 for the heroic victims of this international 
 bad faith, of these unscrupulous imperial 
 designs, and with shame and reprobation in 
 differing degree for the other protagonists. 
 And, as the climax approaches, and stern 
 retributive Justice enters and the fateful 
 lightnings of her terrible swift sword enflame 
 the whole world, even then the soul can but 
 approve the awful sentence and exclaim: 
 "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming 
 of the Lord!" 
 
 One despairs of being able to summon the 
 idea in all the force of its beauty and terror. 
 One longs for images but none come except 
 those, complex and majestic, which are created 
 only through long contemplation of this mag- 
 nificent and dolorous history. One is the more 
 embarrassed in the task because, since those 
 dread years of '95, '96, and '09, when hundreds 
 of thousands of defenceless Armenian men, 
 women, and children were slaughtered in 
 
PAGAN DAYS 5 
 
 cold blood and with complete impunity by 
 the Turkish overlords, while responsible 
 Europe looked passively on, and even humane 
 but un-committed America seemed unable to 
 interfere, the world has accepted Armenia as 
 a static symbol of suffering. It has seen in 
 her merely a figure with hands outstretched 
 in useless supplication, and, except for the 
 coin which it has given her for bread, it has 
 passed on without other thought or reaction. 
 
 To envisage the tragedy as involving in its 
 course the flow of the blood of all nations is, 
 therefore, not only to give it its true political 
 and moral bearing, but to reveal something 
 of its own inherent Titanic grandeur. When 
 the Editor of The World's Work, prefacing 
 Ambassador Morgenthau's series of articles 
 on "Two Years of War in Turkey," says: 
 "Americans who wish to know why their sons 
 are being transformed into soldiers can look 
 to this narrative of events in the minaretted 
 city on the Bosphorus," he indicates the power 
 and sweep of the forces that have been there 
 at work. With "Berlin to Bagdad" in mind 
 as the slogan of the projected pan-Germania, 
 the failure of the Powers to fulfill their treaty 
 
THE TliAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 obligations to Armenia in the years '95 and 
 '96, when the call most emphatically came 
 for the decent solution of the Near Eastern 
 question, becomes clearly an evasion of duty 
 the most fate-laden in all history. And the 
 aspirations and unaided struggles of Armenia 
 assume, accordingly, a majesty and a signifi- 
 cance absolutely unsurpassed. 
 
 But, unfortunately, both for us of America, 
 and for the West in general, as well as for 
 the Armenians themselves, the spiritual 
 glories of this great national drama have been 
 all but hidden from foreigners, except for the 
 few, who, either because of direct contact 
 with this people or some other incentive, 
 have been led especially to that rich field of 
 research which has to do with their extraor- 
 dinary history. For in modern universal his- 
 tory they do not appear, their political identity 
 having become lost in that of their ulti- 
 mate conqueror. And as the Turk himself, 
 until about the middle of the last century, 
 was virtually ostracized from European civil- 
 ization, the Armenians passed into an oblivion 
 only the more complete. When, therefore, 
 toward the end of the nineteenth century, 
 
PAGAN DAYS 7 
 
 they appeared before the world as the victims 
 of cruelties and injustices indescribable and 
 unredressed, it is not to be wondered at, 
 perhaps, that their name should come to be 
 regarded chiefly as one of most shocking hope- 
 lessness and dread. 
 
 But this indicated a generally thoughtless 
 habit of mind. A prolonged national ordeal 
 implies a great national soul, and ought in 
 itself to have suggested the splendidly heroic 
 calibre of the people and of their antecedent 
 history. Not only as the victims of colossal 
 wrongs, but as a force singularly noble and 
 dynamic ought we to know this race, 
 one of the most ancient which today in spite 
 of oppression and persecutions that would 
 either have tamed or annihilated one of less 
 resolute fibre, is still, wherever possible, lavish- 
 ing its remaining strength on behalf of an 
 emancipated world ! 
 
 We cannot find in history a parallel to this 
 story. We turn to art for terms of comparison 
 and find none except in the tragic Greek 
 concept of Prometheus chained to the rocks 
 and torn by vultures for having brought light 
 to the world. Even the artistic imagination 
 
8 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 has never compassed so extended a panorama 
 of undying aspiration and obstinate disaster. 
 How inadequate is "Polyeucte," Corneille's 
 suggestive embodiment of the purely religious 
 side of the struggle ! And yet it is to literary 
 tragedy to that of classic Greece that the 
 mind must hark back if it would find any- 
 where, though on an immeasurably slighter 
 scale, a story told with an equally perfect 
 symmetry, an equal concentration of interest, 
 a terror and pity equally progressive. 
 
 For dramatic time, the tragedy is set amid 
 the rolling centuries. For place, we have a 
 stage unsurpassed in its grandeur and historic 
 association. And for chief protagonists, an 
 Aryan 1 people, independent, inquiring and 
 original of spirit, adventurous, practical and 
 liberty-loving, whom fate leads beyond the 
 frontiers of Europe and their brothers in 
 blood to where the mighty headland of Asia 
 is washed by the Black and Caspian seas. 
 
 Over twenty-five hundred years ago the 
 actors entered the stage, little dreaming that 
 they were treading soil destined to become 
 "the most coveted highway of the world." 
 
PAGAN DAYS 9 
 
 Before them as they marched eastward from 
 Thrace, Thessaly, Phrygia, stood the great 
 pinnacle of Ararat, yet to become a "memo- 
 rial shaft" to millions of their martyred 
 descendants. Snow-capped, towering seven- 
 teen thousand feet into the sky, it stood 
 companioned by its sister peaks. In the 
 general region were other mountains, among 
 them the snow-crowned Varag. Encircled by 
 some of these, upon the shoulders of the 
 tableland, was the intensely blue salt lake of 
 Van; and breaking from the mountain and 
 hillsides were beautiful fountains and streams, 
 and great rivers, two of which, the Tigris 
 (ancient Hiddekel) and the Euphrates, Jew- 
 ish history tells us, bordered the Garden of 
 Eden. 
 
 But the legend of Adam and Eve, and of 
 the Creator who walked in the Garden; the 
 ark of Noah upon the peak of Ararat; the 
 sojourn of Noah and his companions for 
 some time upon the crest of Subhan Dagh 
 a strictly Armenian legend these were to play 
 their part in kindling patriotic imagination 
 only at a later day. The first step was to 
 maintain tribal integrity against the encroach- 
 
10 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 
 
 merits of surrounding despots. And, charac- 
 teristically, the first episode in the national 
 drama it comes to us in a burst of idealized 
 patriotic glory is the victory of the freedom- 
 loving Haig, the founder of the first Armenian 
 dynasty, over the Assyrian tyrant, Bel. 
 
 A succession of many centuries followed, 
 marked by the vicissitudes which are the 
 usual lot of a border state, and during which 
 indigenous tribes evidently became fused with 
 the race of Haig, their great Aryan conqueror 
 and chief. More and more extended grew the 
 kingdom under a long line of kings of this 
 Haikean dynasty until toward the beginning 
 of the second dynasty, the Arshagoonian, 
 under Tigranes the Great, it included Media, 
 Assyria, Cilicia, and Phoenicia. To conflicts 
 with Assyria, Babylonia, Media, Parthia, 
 and Persia had been added conflicts with 
 Macedonia and Rome. Again and again we 
 see these mighty forces victorious, but only 
 partially so. For the Armenians, though 
 frequently overpowered, were never overcome. 
 By statecraft, and by their remarkable power 
 of assimilating their enemies no less than by 
 force of arms, they continued to maintain 
 
PAGAN DAYS 11 
 
 their race and its traditions against all odds. 
 Some innate and irresistible moral stamina 
 enabled them to draw to their cause even the 
 Persian satraps, Parthian princes, and Roman 
 and Seleucian governors who at times ruled 
 over them. Under such suzerainty, they 
 often gathered strength to rise against the 
 old or against some new oppressor, who, bent 
 upon the conquest of Europe or of Asia, 
 swept the country from east to west, or from 
 west to east. 
 
 But war with Rome, instigated, during a 
 period of unprecedented strength and glory, 
 by the Parthian king, Mithridates, the 
 father-in-law of Tigranes; wars between 
 Parthia and Rome and between Rome and 
 Persia were to reduce still further the 
 Armenian dominion to the intolerable posi- 
 tion of a strictlv buffer state. It became a 
 perpetual battle ground, now tributary to 
 Rome, now to Parthia; but even when thus 
 tributary, Armenian leaders of royal and 
 ancient clans or houses, the Ardzrounians, 
 the Pagratians, the Seunians and others, 
 struggling independently both against their 
 would-be masters and against outlying states, 
 
12 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 succeeded not only in maintaining the stand- 
 ard of Armenian independence, but even in 
 establishing new principalities. And as the 
 political power waned, the national character 
 became more and more clearly defined and the 
 longing for a truly national life more intense. 
 
 In the kaleidoscopic pageant of these 
 turbulent centuries, the stage is peopled with 
 mighty historic figures. Confronting Haig, 
 Aram, Ardashes, Ara, Tigranes and the 
 other Armenian kings, are Bel, Tiglath- 
 Pileser, Sardanapalus, Semiramis, Cyrus, 
 Darius, Alexander the Great, Mithridates, 
 Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Mark Antony. 
 Abroad, we see the Armenian king and his 
 followers at the siege of Troy, on the side 
 of Priam, or at Nineveh, at its fall; or, in 
 less fortunate days, against a background of 
 torches and garlands, we see him kneeling 
 a vassal king to receive the crown from Nero 
 in the area before the palace at Rome; or we 
 see him captive, fettered with golden chains, 
 a token of his own triumph which Mark 
 Antony sent to Cleopatra. 
 
 In the politico-social life of this extended 
 
PAGAN DAYS 13 
 
 period, we catch glimpses of other dramatic 
 figures: as prisoner of war, "a noble Hebrew 
 prince, Shempad by name" who affiliated him- 
 self with his conquerors, and became the 
 founder of one of the royal households; 
 the sons of Sennacherib who, after having 
 assassinated their imperial father, "escaped 
 into the land of Armenia," were received by 
 the court and married Armenian princesses; 
 and Hannibal, who fleeing from the vengeance 
 of Rome, took refuge first with Antiochus of 
 Seleucia, and then with Ardashes of Armenia 
 for whom he drew the plan of the city of 
 Ardashat. 
 
 Fortified castles of oriental splendor, cita- 
 dels, towered walls, laden caravans and river 
 argosies, market places, caravanseries, temples 
 to the gods to those of Persia and Greece 
 and other foreign countries as well as to those 
 of Armenia make up the shifting back- 
 ground of the scenes. For both through the 
 foreign conquests imposed upon her, and 
 through her own commercial genius, the 
 nation is in contact with and is at school to 
 the world. The costumes of the characters 
 are vivid; especially do we hear of this 
 
14 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 during the reign of Tigranes, when the dress 
 of the period is described as "beautiful enough 
 to transform even the most ugly." This, of 
 course, refers to that of the favored classes, 
 who also, men as well as women, wore heavy 
 gold chains and necklaces and "rings of gold 
 in their ears." The king wears now a wreath 
 of pearls, or a crown set with immense rubies, 
 placed upon his head by one of his own 
 Pagratian nobles, who alone enjoyed this 
 privilege; or again the crown and purple of 
 Rome as in the days of Antoninus Pius, who 
 sent these tokens of royalty to the Armenian 
 king by special embassy. Even the pages of 
 the royal households wear "rich vestments." 
 There is much use of fur. The costumes of 
 the military officers and soldiery add to the 
 color of the picture. In the days of Herodotus 
 "their arms are like those of the Phrygians." 
 They wear helmets of laced leather and carry 
 spears and shields. Later we see them in iron 
 armor, charging magnificently upon the horses 
 for which their country was famous, and which 
 enabled the Armenian soldiery to become "the 
 best cavalry in the world." 
 
 In the temple schools, religious and ritual- 
 
PAGAN DAYS 15 
 
 istic lore is taught, and on the tablets in the 
 temple libraries are the archives of priest and 
 king for the enlightenment of patriot and 
 scholar. A multitude of cults claim each its 
 votaries. As the people come under the sway 
 now of Macedonia, now of Rome, now of 
 Persia, each tries to impose upon them her 
 own particular culture. The reflective and 
 cosmopolitan mind of the race is turned upon 
 the thought of each, even while the basic 
 allegiance to national tradition is being 
 fostered popularly by the bards especially 
 those of Coghtn, a locality famous alike for its 
 minstrels and its vineyards who go from 
 castle to castle and from festival to festival 
 singing the cosmic myth of the old Armenian 
 sun-god, Vahakn, or the more human romances 
 of love and battle which marked the lives of 
 the ancient kings. From the lips of these 
 singers the people learn of the frightful 
 dragons slain by the early heroes, the dragon 
 being their symbol for mighty enemy na- 
 tions. They hear, too, of the generous largess 
 of their own kings, in the songs which 
 recount glowingly that it "rained gold when 
 Ardashes became King," and that the "pearls 
 
16 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 fell in showers when Queen Satenik became 
 a bride." 
 
 Banquets, too, in honor of the gods; great 
 festival days which bring the people to the 
 groves of sacred poplars by the leaves of 
 which the priests divine; or to the banks of 
 the rivers where white horses and cattle are 
 offered to the waves; to the fetes champetres 
 on Navasard, the New Year, when libations 
 are poured to Aramazd; or to the temples 
 where flocks of doves are loosed and roses 
 strewn in honor of the goddess Anahit, all 
 these festivals and ceremonials serve to unite 
 the people, to develop the national conscious- 
 ness, to engender what Tchobanian calls "the 
 love of the race for itself." 
 
 But the racial soul, though preserved and 
 differentiated through centuries of struggle 
 and at the cost of immense suffering, is none 
 the less, by the first century of our era, 
 seemingly in solution. Natural inclination as 
 well as force of circumstances are drawing 
 the people unconsciously but irresistibly 
 toward the culture of the Romans, and of the 
 Greeks, their one-time congeners of Thrace 
 and Thessaly. But Persia, their formidable 
 
PAGAN DAYS 17 
 
 eastern neighbor, has also a noble culture and 
 an inflexible will to conquer, and it would 
 seem unavoidable, and therefore the part of 
 wisdom, to yield much to her. 
 
 A higher destiny, however, awaited the 
 Armenians. Neither to the Romans nor to 
 the Persians were they to surrender their 
 spiritual identity. The vision of a new order 
 was to take possession of their souls an 
 order differing religiously, socially, and polit- 
 ically from any that had preceded it. It was 
 a moment fraught with worlds of how much 
 significance and peril, when, at the dawn of 
 the Christian era, politically in vassalage to 
 Pagan powers, the race turned its eyes toward 
 Judea. 
 
Chapter II 
 
 FROM THE CONVERSION TO THE 
 CRUSADES 
 
 THE nature and significance of the Chris- 
 tian phase of the Armenian struggle is 
 mirrored in the gigantic conflict which 
 is going on before our eyes today. It is, and 
 has been, chiefly, an aspect and a continua- 
 tion of the terrific combat which threatened 
 to annihilate Europe at the time of the 
 Mohammedan invasions^ It is the conflict of 
 two irreconcilables : the philosophy of Christ 
 with its inherent democracy and its progres- 
 sive implications, its divine discontent, and 
 that of Islam especially of Turkish Islam 
 with its autocratic and fatalistic leanings. 
 And this, of course, is the fundamental issue 
 of the present struggle. The fact that Ger- 
 man "iron crosses" figure on the side of the 
 enemy; the fact that the German deification 
 of Force and of the Sword goes by some 
 other name in no way alters the identity of 
 the issue. Teuton and Turk have united to 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 19 
 
 evoke again the abhorrent vision of world 
 conquest in the name of a God of Battles. 
 Had the Mohammedans of India, Persia, 
 China, Arabia, and Egypt responded to the 
 Berlin-Constantinople invitation to rise in 
 Holy War against the Christian world, we 
 should now be experiencing the full truth of 
 this statement in all its devastating import. 
 
 The Armenian phase of this struggle of 
 ethically inspired democracy against theo- 
 cratic absolutism covers a period of about 
 fifteen hundred years. In the case of indi- 
 viduals and communities, it began even earlier 
 than that, no doubt in the first century to 
 which the Armenians trace the beginnings of 
 their martyrology, in the person of the 
 Princess Santoukhd. The establishment of 
 Christianity as a national religion by King 
 Tiridates, in the year 301, suggests a long 
 antecedent development of the faith among 
 the people in general, and the usual price in 
 suffering. But this is partly a matter of civil 
 history. Exclusively religious wars do not 
 appear to have occurred until some time after 
 the official conversion, although a conflict of 
 this sort is recorded in the year 232, with 
 
20 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Ardashir of Persia as instigator. And in the 
 year 311, because of its religious beliefs, the 
 nation had incurred the hostility of Rome to 
 such an extent that, according to Eusebius, 
 the Emperor Maximianus declared general 
 war upon it. This particular disaster was, 
 however, averted by the accession of Constan- 
 tine to the throne. 
 
 With the bare fact of a Christianity in- 
 eradicable from the people, and for which 
 they have suffered greatly, we are all more 
 or less familiar through the later stories of 
 Turkish persecution. But it is a fact which 
 has lost rather than gained because of a too 
 casual iteration. In centuries dominated by 
 commercial considerations like the beginning 
 of the present, and the past it had no prac- 
 tical weight whatever. As an incentive to 
 armed intervention on their behalf, we know 
 that it utterly failed, Christianity as a rally- 
 ing point, or as an inspired conviction and rule 
 of life, having everywhere lost its force in the 
 West. 
 
 But circumstances have helped to make of 
 Armenia the unceasing champion of this 
 stupendous cause. Among nations she is the 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 21 
 
 mother of Red Cross knights par excellence. 
 Persecution has only increased her fidelity 
 and her courage and clarified her vision. 
 Proximity and subjection to anti-Christian 
 rule have enabled her to estimate properly 
 the menace of this sovereignty. And even 
 as she has struggled against it throughout 
 her history, so has she warned Europe of its 
 danger and invoked her aid. 
 
 To understand her story we must therefore 
 re-orient ourselves with regard both to the 
 idea "Christianity," and to the idea "tragedy" 
 of which Christianity has been in large part 
 the occasion. We must cease to see in them 
 mere fortuitous circumstance. It was the 
 heroic adoption and defence of an exalted life 
 principle which has brought the Armenians 
 so much suffering. And the consequences are 
 not to be regarded as meaningless disaster, 
 but as genuine tragedy in the classic sense: 
 a doom fashioned for itself, in large measure, 
 by high and exceptional character through 
 uncompromising devotion to some great end. 
 
 Let us remember, first, that the pioneer 
 adoption of Christianity by the Pagan Arme- 
 
22 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 nian state was a consciously creative act, 
 and that it required more hardihood, origi- 
 nality and hospitality of mind than was 
 involved in the adoption of this religion after 
 it had received the sanction of Rome and 
 Byzantium. It was, in fact, a more mo- 
 mentous step than that which had led their 
 ancestors to leave their European brothers 
 and strike out across the highlands of Asia; 
 although it signified in the realm of ideas 
 something of the same capacity for adventure 
 and leadership. And shortly this tendency 
 was to receive further illustration along still 
 other moral lines. 
 
 It is worthy of note that the Armenian 
 church which St. Gregory founded and King 
 Tiridates proclaimed some years before the 
 proclamation of Constantine, was to remain 
 an independent church, in spite of persistent 
 overtures from both the Roman and Greek 
 churches, and the practical advantages which 
 might naturally have accrued from alliance 
 with either. Second, that it was to assume 
 very early in its history a democratic char- 
 acter, the election of the Catholicos and other 
 clergy by popular consent being one of its 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 23 
 
 outstanding features. And third, that al- 
 though originally of an austere primitive 
 simplicity, it soon appeared too ritualistic to 
 a portion of this spiritually progressive people, 
 for as early as the fifth century there appeared 
 in Armenia a powerful and much persecuted 
 Protestant sect, the Thonrakians, to the in- 
 fluence of which as it spread under various 
 names through Europe, historians attribute 
 the Reformation, and John Fiske, in his 
 Beginnings of New England, 2 the Puritan 
 movement which has moulded the character of 
 our American institutions. 
 
 Thus we see this politically subject Aryan 
 race whose lot was cast beyond the frontiers 
 of Europe, expressing and applying what was 
 later to become a distinguishing feature of 
 the Western world : the right of the individual 
 to be heard in matters civil and religious. 
 "In politics they leaned toward Democracy," 
 comments Fiske in writing of these early 
 Protestants. One cannot imagine a more 
 fatal circumstance than that which placed 
 such a people in such an environment. Even 
 had they been able to accommodate themselves 
 to the idea of submission in religion and 
 
24 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 politics it would scarcely have solved their 
 problem. There would still have remained 
 the racial affinity which bound them to Europe 
 and which at the time of the Crusades caused 
 Melik Nasr, the Egyptian Sultan, to declare 
 to Leo II, their king, who had applied to 
 him for a treaty of peace: "I will never make 
 peace with you until you promise on oath 
 not to hold any correspondence or commu- 
 nication with Western nations." The bond 
 at that time was not solely religious: it was 
 also social and commercial. It was due to the 
 instinctive sympathy of the people for their 
 kin and for all that savored of progress. And 
 even today this same spirit is making itself 
 felt. At this very moment, poorly equipped 
 and at the mercy of an absolutely pitiless foe, 
 their influence in the Caucasus counts on the 
 side of America and the Allies, and so it is 
 in Mesopotamia, Palestine, France wherever 
 they are to be found. If there is an instance 
 of similar ingrained constancy to heroic ideals 
 under equally desperate conditions, history 
 has not recorded it. May we not hereafter 
 hear less of Armenia as victim and more of 
 her as transcendent heroine? 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 25 
 
 To follow this story from the earliest 
 Christian days to the time when the night of 
 Turkish oppression settled upon the land is to 
 traverse a period every whit as rugged and 
 various, as picturesque and colorful, as were 
 the most glorious days of the pagan era. If 
 we pass over the trembling dawn of the 
 Conversion and come to the fourth and fifth 
 centuries, we shall see all over this still 
 politically distracted period evidences of an 
 intensification of the national spirit hitherto 
 unexampled. 
 
 Although divided at this time between 
 Persia and Byzantium, the people, rising as 
 one in response to the new ideal, mustered 
 abundant evidence of the strength of their 
 moral and intellectual power. With an un- 
 compromising zeal much to be regretted 
 from the historical and artistic points of view 
 they succeeded in virtually obliterating all 
 traces of their pagan life and culture. But 
 they created in its stead another civilization. 
 The pagan temples, and the connecting 
 libraries, so rich in the archives of king and 
 priest that histories had previously been 
 compiled from them, were regrettably demol- 
 
26 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 ished. Fire altars and the golden statues of 
 the divinities met with the same fate. But 
 upon the spot where, according to Neumann, 
 had stood a statue of Hercules, there rose the 
 Mother Church of Armenia, and a new and 
 Christian art came into being. In the noble 
 architecture which was evolved, scholars see 
 the foreshadowing of the Gothic ; in the music, 
 poignant, austere, and characteristic, lies high 
 evidence of esthetic power; but it is in the 
 literature, which sprang into being almost 
 miraculously, that we may most clearly see 
 evidence of the fervid spiritual creativeness 
 which the new life concept occasioned. 
 
 In this aspect of the drama is foreshadowed 
 in intensified and triumphant form that in- 
 tellectual activity and hunger which was to 
 be characteristic of the Armenians through- 
 out their subsequent history. To Rome, to 
 Athens, to Byzantium, to Alexandria, flocked 
 the mature scholars and the aspiring students, 
 just as during the modern renaissance they 
 were to flock to the European and American 
 centers of learning. The Armenian alphabet 
 was invented at this time, as a more fitting 
 "medium by which to transcribe the thoughts 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 27 
 
 of the race than had been the foreign char- 
 acters Syriac, Greek, and Pelhevi hitherto 
 used by them. Great care was lavished upon 
 the study of the Greek and Armenian tongues, 
 and, as a result, the whole Bible had been 
 incomparably translated from the Greek by 
 the year 410, and the Golden Age of Arme- 
 nian classic literature had begun. Moreover, 
 the people had secured for themselves one of 
 the greatest assets of national life, a noble 
 and subtle literary language. Referring to 
 this movement, Dr. Dwight, the American 
 Orientalist, says: 
 
 "Rarely have men in any age or country 
 made more energetic, praiseworthy and suc- 
 cessful efforts in the cultivation of letters 
 than those whose names are recorded in the 
 annals of Armenian literature during the 
 fourth and fifth centuries. Their names are 
 and will be deserving of the most honorable 
 remembrance wherever real merit is appre- 
 ciated and the love of letters cherished." 
 
 But Persia was viewing with increasing 
 hostility this national awakening and rap- 
 prochement with Europe. Already, accord- 
 
28 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 ing to historians, she had entered into secret 
 alliance with India against the so-called 
 Western principle. She rightly estimated 
 that the Christian and progressive tendencies 
 of the new order would alienate the Arme- 
 nians irrevocably from the pagan tyrannies. 
 So she launched upon the country fierce re- 
 ligious wars, and, in the name of her King, 
 Hazgherd, summoned Armenia to renounce 
 Christianity and pay fealty to Ormuzd, and 
 the principle of Fire. She flooded the country 
 with her armies, and Armenia, though lack- 
 ing a central government of her own, took up 
 the challenge. She organized a "popular 
 movement," a Holy League and army com- 
 posed of the heads of the ancient houses 
 and the bishops of the Church and their 
 followers and retainers, and sent forth this 
 great army of Christian knights to meet the 
 hosts of Persia. Already she was practising 
 democratic action. On her side these were 
 peoples' wars. 
 
 On her spiritual victory over her first great 
 religious foe there is not time to dwell. 
 Suffice it to say that carnage and persecution 
 only served to stamp the Christian ideal more 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 29 
 
 ineffaceably upon the hearts of the people, 
 and that in 451 on the memorable field of 
 Avarair, Persia finally recognized the futility 
 of attempting religious coercion. Meanwhile, 
 Byzantium, from affiliation with whose church 
 Armenia had separated at the Council of 
 Chalcedon, had begun to prey more oppres- 
 sively upon the harassed state where "two 
 tides, that of the East and that of the West, 
 strove for mastery." And so the civilization 
 which the Armenians were developing re- 
 ceived a sudden and serious check. But 
 racially and religiously they withstood the 
 onslaught, and, cheated of their political 
 destiny at home, they sought in the service of 
 their Byzantine foe and rival an outlet for 
 y their creative energies. And so victorious 
 were they that according to Finlay, Bryce, 
 Schlumberger, Rambaud, Bussell, Gelzer, 
 and others, the Eastern Empire was for 
 several centuries not Greek but Armenian. 
 It was the Armenian Emperor Leo, known 
 as the Image Breaker because of his icono- 
 clasm, who commanded Rome to destroy her 
 images. He had been converted by the 
 
30 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 
 
 Armenian Paul, to whom the Protestant sect 
 of the Paulicians owes its name. 
 
 But the most important event in connection 
 with this peaceful conquest of Byzantium was 
 the service which it enabled the Armenians 
 to pay to Western civilization. They filled 
 the civil offices and officered the army, and 
 Leo the Iconoclast was still emperor when 
 the Saracens hurled against Constantinople 
 the largest Mohammedan army ever assem- 
 bled. "Of its 180,000 men, only 30,000 
 got back home, according to Mohammedan 
 authorities," says Finlay, and he adds: 
 "Twenty-two years later, Leo annihilated 
 another great Moslem army, and for two 
 centuries the Saracens scarcely troubled the 
 empire again." By this service, as momentous 
 as was that of Charles Martel upon the field 
 of Tours, the Armenians have placed the 
 entire world in their debt. 
 
 Meanwhile, in Armenia proper, we see the 
 nation again rallying incredibly under a third 
 dynasty of their own kings, the Pakradoonian, 
 with Ani, the city of a thousand churches, as 
 its capital. But we see, too, the old jealous 
 Destiny at work. The Greeks, who had again 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 81 
 
 gained the ascendancy in Byzantium, warred 
 upon this kingdom ceaselessly, actuated partly 
 by their hostility towards the independent 
 Armenian Church; and, finally, leaguing 
 themselves with the Saracens, they compelled 
 it to surrender (1045). 
 
 And so the third Armenian dynasty fell, 
 after an existence of three hundred years; 
 and so were frustrated, as so often before, 
 the efforts of the Armenian race to realize 
 in freedom its own genius. Of the monu- 
 ments which remain of this civilization, Lynch 
 says that "they throw strong light upon the 
 character of the Armenian people and bring 
 into pronouncement important features of 
 Armenian history," that "they denote a 
 standard of culture far in advance of the 
 contemporary standard in the West," and 
 that "they leave no doubt that this people 
 may be included in the small number of races 
 susceptible of the highest culture." 
 
 But Byzantium herself was to rue the fatal 
 downfall of the Pagratids. Just as she was 
 triumphing over their humiliation, there 
 loomed upon the horizon great hosts of tribes- 
 men from Mongolia and Tartary, as if in 
 
82 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 prophecy of the vengeance which should 
 follow. Alp Arslan, the precursor of Genghis 
 Khan, Ertoghrul, and Othman, suggested, 
 could she but have read the lesson, the sub- 
 sequent capture of Jier own capital city by 
 Mohammed II and her own overthrow. In 
 helping to destroy the Pakradoonian king- 
 dom, she had shattered "the advance guard 
 of Christian civilization in the East," and 
 had opened the way to the invading foe. 
 
 With fate so much against them, the 
 Armenians might now have retired from 
 further contest and still, having survived the 
 Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Jews, 
 upon the home ground be reckoned a mar- 
 velously tenacious race. But they were not 
 to retire. The old obstinacy of purpose, the 
 old deathless courage of their ancestors still 
 mastered them, and inspired certain feudal 
 princes to still another attempt at establishing 
 an Armenian state. One of these, Rhupen 
 of the Mountain, a cousin to the Pakradoonian 
 kings, set up, on the heights of the Tau- 
 rus overlooking the Mediterranean, another 
 Armenian kingdom, known both as the King- 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 33 
 
 dom of Lesser Armenia and as the Kingdom 
 of Cilicia, and by open and definite alignment 
 with Europe, proved anew the singular cos- 
 mopolitan bias, the keen political vision of 
 the racial stock. Attacked, besieged by Arabs 
 and Tartars, intrigued against and even 
 warred upon by Byzantium, the Rhupenian 
 dynasty maintained its existence for three 
 hundred years, and shaped for itself a strik- 
 ingly liberal policy. Armenians were sent 
 to colonize in Italy. Italians were welcomed 
 in Cilicia. Active commercial relations were 
 entered upon between the two countries, the 
 governmental administration was perfected, 
 so that in the thirteenth century Marco Polo, 
 who visited it, was able to report that it "was 
 governed with much justice and economy," 
 and that "the port, Pay as, was the magazine 
 of all the precious merchandise and of all 
 the wealth of the Orient." And when the 
 Rhupenian line failed for want of an heir, 
 the nation, for political purposes, invited a 
 Latin prince of the French family of Lusignan 
 to occupy the throne. 
 
 The Crusades had early offered to this 
 Kingdom a signal opportunity for open 
 
34 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 advocacy of the Christian faith which it was 
 not slow to accept. Regardless of their 
 material safety, conscious only of the fact 
 that spiritually and intellectually their destiny 
 converged with that of Europe, the Armenians 
 allied themselves to the Christian forces 
 throughout the entire period "by lending aid 
 in men, in horses, in arms, in food, in council' ' 
 and "by acting as guides in the desert." The 
 part they played in these struggles may be 
 gauged by the recognition offered them by the 
 popes and emperors of the period. On the 
 other hand, their own expectation of succor 
 may be gathered from this 12th century poem 
 by the Armenian Nerses, called the Gracious, 
 one of the nation's greatest poets and saints. 
 The translation was made by Miss Zabelle 
 Boyajian of London: 
 
 THE CRUSADERS 
 
 Once more God hither moves their course; 
 
 With countless infantry and horse, 
 
 As swell the waves towards the strand, 
 
 Fierce and tempestuous, they land. 
 
 Like sands that by the ocean lie, 
 
 Or like the stars that strew the sky, 
 
 They fill the earth where'er they go 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 35 
 
 And whiten it as wool or snow. 
 
 Their voice is like the northern wind, 
 
 Driving the storm-cloud from behind. 
 
 They clear the land from end to end, 
 
 The unbelievers forth they send, 
 
 Redeeming from such hopeless plight 
 
 All Christians held within their might. 
 
 Now in the churches cold and dark, 
 
 Once more shall burn the taper's spark; 
 
 And you, my sons, late forced to flee 
 
 To distant lands, afar from me, 
 
 Shall now return in chariots fair 
 
 Drawn by brave steeds with trappings rare. 
 
 And I shall lift mine eyes above 
 
 Beholding near me those I love. 
 
 My arms about you I shall fold, 
 
 Rejoicing with a joy untold; 
 
 And my black robes aside will lay 
 
 To dress in greens and crimsons gay. 
 
 But, alas, although the Armenians put their 
 all to the test, they were to see the hosts of 
 Islam triumph. Weaker and weaker grew 
 European resistance until at last, abandoned 
 by the West, and in a terrible isolation, 
 moral and military, the knights of Armenia 
 stood alone upon their mountain tops and 
 watched the crusading hosts recede never to 
 return. 
 
36 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 The kingdom was obliged to surrender to 
 the Sultans of Egypt, in 1375, and their last 
 king was made captive. After his ransom 
 by Spain, in vain did he go from France to 
 England and from England to France, beg- 
 ging these countries to mend their quarrels, 
 to return to their task of defending Western 
 civilization. His sagacious council was un- 
 heeded. The barbaric hordes inundated 
 Armenia Major, Minor, and Lesser and 
 drew nearer and yet more near to Con- 
 stantinople. 
 
 An interminable succession of pictures 
 throng upon the vision during this second 
 grouping of the tragedy. The pageantry of 
 the classic era made vivid to us by the histo- 
 rian Egishe the fortresses, the high seats of 
 the palaces, the bridal chambers, the dining 
 places with carven platter and other costly 
 vessels of the table, the ushers by the door, 
 the cup-holders at the festival, the flower 
 gardens and vineyards, the hunting excur- 
 sions, the councils of the bishops and princes, 
 the heroism of the battlefields all dissolve 
 and in their place come the glories of the 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 37 
 
 foreign service at Byzantium, the triumph 
 and the defeat of the Kingdom of Ani and 
 the brilliancy and eclipse of the Kingdom of 
 Cilicia. The scenes are invested with all the 
 romance and glamour of the medieval period 
 of Europe. Feudal virtues and feudal ex- 
 cesses characterize the social life. Great 
 houses clash with one another, betray one 
 another, display vengeance and hostility as 
 well as splendid generosity and superhuman 
 courage. The mountain heights are bristling 
 with battlements. Armies swarm in the defiles 
 and on the plains. The whole period surges 
 with activity. 
 
 And yet, amid all the political strife and 
 discord, there is room for Art to make its 
 wonderful way; not only that of the classic 
 period already referred to, not only in the 
 architecture of the Kingdom of Ani, or in the 
 beautiful anthems, liturgy and formal litera- 
 ture of the Church, but in a wonderful lyric 
 poetry which graced especially the medieval 
 period, and in many fascinating forms of 
 purely decorative art. 8 The lyrical poetry of 
 medieval Armenia has been declared by 
 Mr. Valery Brussov, a contemporary Russian 
 
38 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 authority, to be "among the treasures of the 
 world," and the genius of her decorative 
 artists is evident from the wonderful carvings 
 in stone, wood, ivory, and metal which they 
 have left. Old tombstones, croziers, walls, 
 cups, exhibit a workmanship the spirit and 
 technique of which has been the inspiration 
 of similar work in Europe. To Armenia, too, 
 the origins of cloisonne enamel are traced. A 
 type of picture called by the Armenians 
 "thought-work," and made by the applica- 
 tion of bits of fabric of different colors 
 upon a plain background, is said to have so 
 delighted Botticelli that he introduced it to 
 Italy and made use of the idea in church 
 decoration. In days precarious but still irra- 
 diated by the "fighting chance" these offerings 
 to beauty formed a significant part of the 
 background of the changing scenes. And we 
 infer from their presence human happiness 
 and rapture, gaiety and love. 
 
 Among the myriads of characters who defile 
 across the stage we dimly discern the apostles, 
 Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and the Princess 
 Santoukhd and other martyrs who offered up 
 their lives in the first faint dawn of Chris- 
 
FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 39 
 
 tianity. We see Ripsime, the beautiful Roman 
 virgin, and her companions, who, to escape 
 the attentions of the Emperor Diocletian, 
 "took refuge in the outskirts of the Armenian 
 capital, Vagharshapat," only to enkindle the 
 desire of King Tiridates, from whom she 
 also fled, to be later captured and finally 
 executed for her noble obstinacy; we see the 
 great Illuminator, Gregory, we see warrior 
 bishop, Puritan democrat, feudal lord, scholar, 
 artist, merchant, emperor, soldier, Red Cross 
 knight, all of Armenian race. We see, in 
 his olive wreath, the Armenian Varastad, 
 victor of the last Olympian game; Prceresius, 
 the rhetorician, to whom Rome erected a 
 statue with the following inscription, Re gin a 
 rerum Roma regi eloquentiae; and generals 
 and statesmen who add glory to Byzantium. 
 Harun al Raschid, Conrad of Wittlesbach, 
 Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillon, 
 Bohemond, Tancred, Frederick Barbarossa, 
 Richard the Lion-Hearted, Saladin, give 
 place before our eyes to the frightful forms 
 of Alp Arslan, Genghis Khan, and Tamer- 
 lane. And, throughout, whether against 
 Persian tyrant, Saracen, Mongol, or Turk, 
 
40 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 we see massed the solid legions of the 
 Armenian people, who not only met the 
 enemy valiantly on countless battlefields, but 
 who, as martyrs to the ideals of Christianity 
 and nationality, laid down their lives heroi- 
 cally, simply, and as a matter of course. 
 
Chapter III 
 
 UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 
 
 AND THE SPIRITUAL 
 
 RENAISSANCE 
 
 THE "noble singleness of feature" which 
 marked the moral aspect of the preced- 
 ing stages of the drama, persists with a 
 growing majesty and poignancy in the final 
 stages. The loss by the Armenians of eveiy 
 vestige of political and military power raises 
 the plane of action to that of the naked spirit 
 in battle with brute force, ignorance, mate- 
 rialism, intrigue and treachery. In a sense, 
 it becomes an issue between one little unarmed 
 nation and the world. And as the protago- 
 nists other than Turkey enter Christian 
 Europe, and, in a remote and non-official 
 way, Christian America the concentration 
 of interest, expectation, suspense, terror, 
 loathing, shame, disappointment, and pity, 
 mount to heights of intolerable intensity. 
 The striking elements of beauty which still 
 remain are all but lost in a chaos of the revolt- 
 
42 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 ing and the sordid, the disgraceful and heart- 
 rending. 
 
 The pagan period of the drama was marked, 
 it is true, by immense political and military 
 contests and upheavals and by all the horrors 
 of foreign invasions. But these were the lot 
 of most peoples in the days of early martial 
 society. And while, as Lord Byron said, "it 
 would be difficult to find the annals of a 
 nation less stained with crimes than those of 
 the Armenians," still they gave and took 
 with the rest to some extent, and under 
 Tigranes, at least, became a really imperial 
 power. And the very fact that as a people 
 they survived the military inundations of the 
 great Oriental tyrannies which obliterated so 
 many of their neighbors, and that they suc- 
 ceeded in maintaining and developing a 
 civilization of their own, tinges the ordeal 
 with all the luster of triumph. 
 
 The second period, too, although marked 
 by severe and continuous religious and 
 political persecution and the destruction of 
 the attainments of two comparatively long 
 and successful dynasties, is still flooded with 
 the glory of action and conspicuous achieve- 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 43 
 
 merit. In the Aryan Persians, as in the 
 Romans and Byzantines, the Armenians 
 could recognize ethnic similarity, and extract 
 from these conquerors a kind of moral tribute 
 in the way of a quasi autonomy. The Sara- 
 cens Arab or Egyptian were likewise of a 
 highly evolved racial type. And there was a 
 possibility even here for reciprocal adjust- 
 ments. 
 
 But the race to which they now fell victim 
 were marauding nomads from Central Asia, 
 possessing no culture of their own, and of 
 an inferior mentality. Whatever religion 
 they may once have followed they speedily 
 discarded in favor of a corrupted form of 
 Islam, in the sword-worshiping, world-con- 
 quering aspects of which they saw reflected 
 their own basic instincts. The six centuries 
 which have elapsed since their coming and 
 the power which they have enjoyed, have 
 only served to prove their brutality and 
 their worthlessness as factors in civilization. 
 Plunder, murder and rape were and still are 
 their main incentives to action, and their 
 iniquities and incompetence have been pro- 
 
44 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 
 
 vocative of endless wars, of which the present 
 holocaust is but the logical culmination. 
 
 During the first three or more hundred 
 years of this domination, the Armenians as 
 a people were practically blotted out from 
 the annals of history. Europe, unable or 
 unwilling to contest the supremacy of the foe 
 in Asia, had turned from the blighted East 
 to the wonders of her own renaissance, and, 
 except for her terrific struggles with the Turk 
 as he encroached more and more upon the 
 heart of her own territory, lent no direct 
 assistance to the beleagured frontier. In vain 
 did the popes preach new crusades. Byzan- 
 tium was allowed to fall almost unaided. 
 Eastern Christendom, as such, was forgotten. 
 
 The last Armenian dynasty had surrendered 
 to the Sultans of Egypt just seventy-eight 
 years before the capture of Constantinople. 
 If the greater power had been unable to 
 withstand the assaults of the foe, if massacre 
 was the lot of masses of the Greeks and 
 servitude the destiny of the survivors, how 
 must it have fared with this people who 
 lacked any semblance of political cohesion, 
 in the days when Mohammed II was turning 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 45 
 
 churches into mosques, and threatening to 
 feed oats to his horse from the high altar of 
 St. Peter's? 
 
 Except for the inhabitants of certain moun- 
 tain regions difficult of access two of which, 
 Zeitoun and Sassoun, retained a rough inde- 
 pendence until the present war the Arme- 
 nians were subjected everywhere to the rav- 
 ages of fire, sword, pillage, and enslavement. 
 Then, as now, love of plunder rather than 
 love of Islam was the motive which led the 
 soldiers to these extreme excesses. Four- 
 fifths of all the loot accrued to them; the 
 remaining fifth went to the Emperor. Conse- 
 quently all the inhabitants, high and low, were 
 stripped of their possessions. Resistance was 
 impossible. 
 
 But even while the people of the homeland 
 were being massacred and enslaved, the 
 Armenians of the Dispersion, it is well to 
 remember, were continuing to play their im- 
 memorial part in the war between Liberty 
 and Tyranny, Civilization and Barbarism. 
 "In 1410," writes Tchobanian, "all the Arme- 
 nian nobility [of Poland whither they had 
 emigrated in the 11th century] fought with 
 
46 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 the armies of Ladislas Jagello, and in the 
 battle of Grundwaldt contributed to the vic- 
 tory. [The war between Poland and Prussia] . 
 In 1683, in the great war of the Austrians 
 against the Turks, five thousand Armenian 
 soldiers fought valiantly with King Sobieski 
 at the gates of Vienna." 
 
 Meanwhile, in Turkey, amid the appalling 
 domestic decadence, moral and material, which 
 attended the barbaric reigns of the successive 
 Sultans; under the terrific strain of constant 
 and burdensome wars undertaken by the 
 usurpers against Europe, Persia, and Egypt; 
 scattered unarmed among a foe whose author- 
 ity was swiftly and summarily enforced by 
 the scimitar, by poison, by the rope, by 
 strangulation, by imprisonment; a foe which 
 took the savage's delight in devising new 
 methods of torture, and which claimed re- 
 ligious sanction for all abominations inflicted 
 upon the Giaours (infidels) ; amid this in- 
 credible orgy of license and cruelty, which, 
 in the earlier days, had struck terror into 
 the hearts of free and powerful peoples, the 
 Armenians, with a tenacity as amazing as 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 47 
 
 characteristic, gradually resumed in impres- 
 sive, though in far humbler form, something 
 of the old r6le of intellectual and practical 
 leadership which at other times in their his- 
 tory had resulted in the conquest of their 
 conquerors. 
 
 Banned from the army, their word refused 
 in courts of law, the women subject to seizure, 
 their property to confiscation upon no provo- 
 cation, taxed to the utmost, they nevertheless 
 succeeded in maintaining some kind of civil 
 and social fabric for the wastrels who had 
 overpowered them. They were the bankers, 
 artists, traders, artisans, and farmers; but 
 even as they conducted the commerce, plied 
 the trades, tilled the fields, built the marble 
 palaces, filled those administrative posts 
 which demanded constructive ability, went 
 as ambassadors to foreign countries, and in 
 all ways augmented the resources of the State, 
 they were, as a people, despised and outlawed 
 by their idle and arrogant masters who looked 
 upon them as "rayahs" fit only to be ex- 
 ploited; and in secret and in silence the noble 
 traditions of their own race and religion took 
 deep and deeper root. 
 
48 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 During these centuries of enslavement, the 
 Armenian race lost much by migrations, 
 forced and voluntary. Europe, India, and 
 Persia claimed the ambitions of many of the 
 ablest. Evidence of the early Armenian 
 dispersion in Europe is to be found in the 
 fact that books in Armenian characters 
 were printed as early as 1488 at Venice and 
 Amsterdam, and at Lembourg, Milan, Paris, 
 Marseilles, Leipzig, and Padua, during the 
 years of the two succeeding centuries. They 
 are said to have founded the city of Calcutta. 
 Certain it is that they rose to wealth and 
 influence in the life of British East India in 
 general, and that they enjoyed privileges 
 there usually reserved for Englishmen alone. 
 We hear of them as "prime ministers" to the 
 native princes; and as confidential servants 
 to the British crown. 
 
 The songs of homesickness, or of longing 
 for the emigrant, which appear at this time, 
 testify to the sufferings and losses inflicted 
 by these migrations. A melancholy settled 
 upon the spirit of the people. It is felt in 
 their music. It throbs in their poetry. "No 
 Christian dare look a Turk in the face," 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 49 
 
 commented a European traveler who was one 
 of the first to cross the gulf which had sep- 
 arated the country from the West since the 
 Turkish occupation. The scimitar and the 
 bludgeon of the Turk had indeed overawed 
 the defenceless Christian populations. There 
 was no contesting the might of his brutal force. 
 But the Armenians had a higher daring. 
 They alone, of all the peoples of Asia which 
 had fallen beneath his yoke, had achieved the 
 miracle of retaining the four great essentials 
 of national life racial purity, racial customs, 
 religious integrity, and language. Even the 
 soul of the once formidable Persia, which 
 had been Mohammedanized by the Saracens, 
 and which had come indirectly under Turkish 
 influence, had lost its ancient characteristics. 
 While the Chaldeans, the Ghebers, the 
 Syrians, and, in Egypt, the Copts, had lost 
 language, religion, or national traditions, 
 one or more, the Armenians, on the contrary, 
 not only jealously retained all their distin- 
 guishing features, but were to emerge at the 
 end of the long struggle with a national con- 
 sciousness distinctly heightened. This fact 
 
50 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 more than any other, says De Morgan, 
 "entitles them now to a national re-birth." 
 
 The best that can be said of this period of 
 bondage is that it taught the people endurance 
 and reliance upon one another. Persecution 
 brought the cohesion which their independent 
 nature and the mountainous character of 
 their country had tended to disrupt. Because 
 of religious exclusiveness and sane habits of 
 life they had suffered no racial degeneracy. 
 Together with their intellectual vigor they 
 had managed to retain their primitive physical 
 strength. It was, on the whole, a fine race 
 which had survived the conquest and captivity. 4 
 Men and women there were of many types 
 of form and of countenance; numbers tall 
 and well knit, with faces of the distinctively 
 Armenian cast: lofty and, among the men, 
 even massive foreheads, high noses, straight 
 or aquiline, dark eyes, and hair abundant 
 and black; their complexions and lips vivid 
 with the rich color lent them by the brilliant 
 sun and pure air of the great tableland and 
 of the mountainous region of Cilicia; their 
 demeanor grave and reposeful, reminiscent of 
 the dignity of their neighbors of India. Others 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 51 
 
 there were who showed traces of the Semitic 
 strain which had mingled with the race during 
 the dim days of the Babylonian captivity and 
 at other periods of their history. Less repose 
 but more vivacity marked their features. Not 
 infrequently there appeared another type, 
 more blooming but more delicate, of fairer 
 and rosier skin, and more languorous air. And 
 again it was not uncommon to see faces of a 
 heavier cast which suggested descent from 
 the tribes of the Kingdom of Ararat, the 
 original Uradhu, which Haig had overcome. 
 A similar variety one observes among all the 
 European races. 
 
 These men and women had given to each 
 other in monogamous marriage all those 
 affections and loyalties which make family 
 life devoted and high. Husband and wife, 
 parents and children, sister and brother, 
 stood by one another with a patriarchal sim- 
 plicity and fervor. The children of the house- 
 holds were lovingly and wisely nurtured, and 
 the old people honored. In their own homes 
 and in their own churches they observed un- 
 noticed their national and religious festivals. 
 And in their own schools, which they 
 
52 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 themselves maintained, the more favored 
 of the people received the education which 
 their limited opportunities afforded. The 
 knowledge of their past glories and of their 
 ancient and medieval literatures were veiled 
 from them, partly through the evolution of 
 their language from the classic to the modern, 
 partly through the scarcity of books, but 
 more largely through the opposition of their 
 masters to all that savored of enlightenment. 
 The weight of the oppressor was so great and 
 circumstances so hostile as almost to extin- 
 guish the aggressive intellectualism which has 
 always been their dominant trait. Since the 
 downfall of their last dynasty they had 
 suffered all the crippling disabilities of a 
 proscribed race. The production of a new 
 literature was all but impossible. 
 
 But while body and soul were thus in bond- 
 age, the spirit of liberty and light which had 
 guided the destiny of the race in other days 
 was not without its testimony. Toward the 
 close of the eighteenth century two great 
 figures appear, one an incarnation of the 
 political, the other of the cultural, genius of 
 the Armenian race. It is evident through the 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 53 
 
 career of Israel Ori that the dream of an inde- 
 pendent Armenia had never completely faded, 
 and that the fierce love of freedom which had 
 characterized the feudal nobility had not 
 wholly waned in their descendants. 
 
 Israel Ori was of Persian and not of Turk- 
 ish Armenia, but his heroic scheme of political 
 emancipation was intended to apply to all 
 the Armenians who had come under the power 
 of the tyrannical Mussulmans of the East. 
 He was one of a group of Armenian meliks 
 (hereditary princes) of the province of 
 Karabagh, a mountainous district which, 
 although paying tribute to Persia, had main- 
 tained a semi-autonomy. These men "y earne cl 
 to enter upon a new era of freedom" and 
 dared to take bold steps to secure that end. 
 After repeated efforts at self-liberation the 
 nobility of the rebellious principalities decided 
 to send Ori as their representative to the 
 courts of Europe with the object of soliciting 
 the "aid and protection of the Powers," in the 
 furtherance of the revolt at home. After 
 twenty long years of unflagging effort, he 
 finally succeeded in obtaining formal promises 
 of help from the Emperor Leopold and Peter 
 
54 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 the Great. And although the outbreak of the 
 Russo- Swedish war prevented the consumma- 
 tion of the project, the episode is none the less 
 most significant in the life of the nation. It 
 is more than a drama within a drama. It is 
 part of the old sequence, and a prophecy of 
 what was yet to follow. For we see fore- 
 shadowed in the patient but dauntless char- 
 acter of the chief actor, the patriots who were 
 to plead the cause of their race so bravely 
 and so steadfastly in the nineteenth and 
 twentieth centuries. 
 
 The other great figure of this era of 
 awakening is Mekhitar, an Armenian monk 
 a convert to Catholicity who, realizing that 
 he could accomplish nothing for his race 
 should he remain in Turkey, left that be- 
 nighted country for Venice, where, under the 
 patronage of the Pope, he founded the great 
 Armenian monastery and outpost of learning 
 known as the Convent of St. Lazar. Here he 
 and the brotherhood of Armenians whom he 
 drew about him began their great work of 
 editing and publishing the ancient works of 
 the forefathers which they had brought with 
 them in their ancient manuscript form. Here 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 55 
 
 they wrote original histories and other books 
 and compiled grammars and dictionaries. 
 Here they translated the works of the 
 writers of the Western world, of modern 
 days and of antiquity. It was this move- 
 ment which ushered in the sublime but ill- 
 fated modern renaissance. Not only was 
 knowledge of the deeds of the great kings 
 who had gained for them nationality, and of 
 the great saints who had brought them Chris- 
 tianity, made common property, not only 
 were the splendid traditions of Ararat, Ani, 
 and Cilicia revived; the mind of the people 
 was brought into contact with the mind of 
 Europe, and especially with that of France, 
 so that by the middle years of the nineteenth 
 century all the best modern theories and 
 philosophies had their ardent votaries among 
 these outcast subjects of the besotted and 
 reactionary Ottoman State. Gradually the 
 race very generally began to exhibit tokens 
 of its old eager creativeness. 
 
 Other causes contributed to this awakening 
 of the national spirit. The vivifying in- 
 fluence of Europe and America was felt in 
 the persons of the statesmen, travelers, mer- 
 
56 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 chants and scholars, and above all mission- 
 aries and teachers who began to penetrate the 
 country. Although these were of the race of 
 the Crusaders, they knew nothing of these 
 ancient allies of their forefathers, and were 
 not prepared to meet a race so congenial of 
 spirit, so dynamic and original of mind. 
 "They are the Dutch of the East," wrote 
 Dulaurier. "They are like the Swiss," said 
 Lamartine. "We have found the Yankees of 
 the East," exclaimed the American mission- 
 aries who had gone to the country for 
 the purpose of converting the Mohammedan 
 Turk. 
 
 Schools began to multiply, Armenian as 
 well as American and French. The rap- 
 prochement with the West was further 
 accelerated by the number of students, who, 
 in the universities of Europe and America, at 
 the Venetian monastery of St. Lazar, and at 
 the sister house which had been established 
 at Vienna, felt the divine flame of the rising 
 civilization which their own ancestors had 
 done so much to kindle and to foster. Not in 
 the degraded concepts of Turkey, but in the 
 visions of the aspiring West, did the Armenian 
 
UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 57 
 
 spirit find fellowship and affirmation. It was 
 evident that such a people could not longer 
 endure the blighting limitations and exactions 
 of the Turkish yoke. 
 
Chapter IV 
 
 THE RISE 
 
 AND INFLUENCE OF THE NEAR 
 
 EASTERN QUESTION 
 
 THE modern Near Eastern Question was 
 a weighty factor in the efflorescence of 
 light and hope which revealed to the 
 Armenians of the later nineteenth century all 
 the degradation and horror of the Turkish 
 domination, just as it was the chief force in 
 the determination of the last, most terrible, 
 and most piteous phase of the entire Arme- 
 nian tragedy. In so far as it was concerned 
 with the treatment of Christians in general, 
 in the Near East, it was but a resumption of 
 the ancient discussion begun by Charlemagne 
 and Harun al Raschid. This has been a 
 courtly, and, on the whole, a satisfactory 
 correspondence, as were afterwards the inter- 
 changes between the Christian knights and 
 the mighty Saladin. But the Turks were of 
 another order, and the motives of the Western 
 intercessors, too, had very radically changed. 
 The espousal of the Christian cause by 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION DV 
 
 Russia, her assumption of the r6le of pro- 
 tector of the Christians of the East officially 
 conferred upon her in 1774 by the Treaty of 
 Kainardje, has, in spite of its obvious ulterior 
 motive, something of the old chivalrous flavor 
 of the Middle Ages. And this glamour of a 
 semi-disinterested championship she somehow 
 consistently managed to sustain until the 
 coming to power of the reactionary Alex- 
 ander III. In the face of her actual accom- 
 plishment and the fact that the wars she 
 waged time after time on behalf of the Balkan 
 Christians brought her no substantial increase 
 in territory, we can hardly say that her 
 motives were unmitigatedly sordid. We must 
 make some possible allowance for Russian 
 mysticism and ideality, and admit the possi- 
 bility of a rude Christian esprit de corps in 
 this uncouth nation, so late in coming under 
 the "rationalizing" influence of the West. 
 Or, even if we must suspect that her motives 
 were always wholly selfish, we are obliged to 
 admit that they none the less served most 
 excellent ends. 
 
 However this may be, the revival of interest 
 in the forgotten East on the part of the other 
 
60 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 European powers was nothing if not frankly 
 utilitarian. It is certain that they did not 
 even play at dragon-killing. From the first, 
 they recognized the iniquities of Turkish rule, 
 especially as it affected the subject Christians, 
 but they took no more than an academic 
 interest in the matter. They had outgrown 
 mysticism and sentimentality, and had be- 
 come out and out opportunists, at least so 
 far as foreign policies were concerned. With 
 economic and territorial expansion as the 
 guiding governmental motives, it was natural 
 that the point of view of the Crusader should 
 give way to that of the adept in diplomacy, 
 the broker, the militarist. Especially after 
 the first quarter of the nineteenth century 
 did the relation between the West and the 
 Turkish empire take on the definite char- 
 acter of a politico-economic gamble. Neither 
 the religion nor the national aspirations of the 
 Christian races were of any moment in the 
 eyes of the great imperialisms, whatever these 
 might mean to the more idealistic men and 
 women of the respective home populations. 
 
 A corresponding change of outlook had not 
 occurred among the Christians of Turkey. 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 61 
 
 There the issues of Christianity and of 
 Nationality were still keen and vital, and the 
 love and longing for freedom in these impor- 
 tant respects were still intense because of 
 centuries of denial on the one hand, and of 
 valiant affirmation on the other. Besides, the 
 Christians of the East, even the Armenians, 
 although in the earlier days of their history 
 as noted for their commercial genius as were 
 the Phoenicians, and, in their later days, as 
 are the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews, were 
 practically untouched by that scientifically 
 relentless commercial spirit of the Mechanical 
 Age which had transformed Europe. Even 
 the shrewdest bankers and business men were 
 unsophisticated and primitive in their outlook 
 when compared with this new type of financier 
 and statesman which was evolving in the West 
 and which reckoned personal and national 
 profits in terms of politico-economic exploita- 
 tion. Their dreams of liberation were founded 
 upon quite another and simpler scheme of 
 life. 
 
 Moreover, the masses of the Armenian 
 people were farmers and tradesmen, prac- 
 tical, frugal, shrewd, but, strange as it may 
 
62 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 seem, simple, and, in spite of a subtle 
 native discernment, confiding. They idealized 
 Europe. They respected her as a co-religion- 
 ist, and admired her as the exemplar of 
 Progress and establisher of Law. In spite of 
 themselves, they could not help looking to her 
 for ultimate redemption. The fact that the 
 prophets and peoples of Europe and the 
 narrow governing circles were two distinct 
 propositions, neither the Christians of Turkey- 
 in-Asia nor those of the Balkans seem ever 
 fully to have grasped. In the Armenian 
 struggle, this vain but persistent hope of a 
 chivalrous European intervention adds the 
 crowning torture to the culminating disasters 
 which were to overtake them with almost 
 annihilating force. 
 
 So much for the new factors which entered 
 to complicate an already involved and des- 
 perate situation. On its political side, the 
 contest resolved itself into a question either 
 of the control or dismemberment of Turkey 
 by one or more of the European powers or 
 her own self-redemption. Her own corrup- 
 tion and incompetence, largely, had fashioned 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 63 
 
 the impasse. ^Naturally, as an integral part 
 of Turkey-in-Asia, the Armenians were chiefly 
 concerned with internal reform. Unlike the 
 Balkan nationalities, with them, as Viscount 
 Bryce remarks, "The alternative to an Otto- 
 man State was not an Armenian State, but a 
 partition among the Powers, which would 
 have ended the ambitions of Turk and Arme- 
 nian alike. The Powers concerned were quite 
 ready for a partition, if only they could agree 
 upon a division of the spoils. This common 
 inheritance of the Armenians and the Turks 
 was potentially one of the richest countries 
 in the Old World, and one of the few that 
 had not yet been economically developed. 
 The problem for the Armenians was not how \ 
 to overthrow the Ottoman Empire but how to 
 preserve it, and their interest in its preserva- 
 tion was even greater than that of their 
 Turkish neighbors and co-heirs. . . . Talent 
 and temperament had brought most of the 
 industry, commerce, finance and skilled in- 
 tellectual work of Turkey into the Armenians' 
 hands. And if the Empire were preserved by 
 timely reforms from within, the position of 
 the Armenians would become still more 
 
64 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 favorable, for they were the only native 
 element capable of raising the Empire 
 economically, intellectually and morally to 
 a European standard, by which alone its 
 existence could permanently be secured.' ' 
 
 Consequently, the Armenians were bent 
 upon securing such reform. The constitution 
 drawn up in '76 by the Armenian statesman, 
 Krikor Odian, Secretary to the Turkish 
 reformer, Midhat Pasha, which was pro- 
 claimed and then immediately revoked by 
 Sultan Abdul Hamid, would have served 
 this end. But the Government, blind to its 
 own interest, and radically unable to see the 
 legitimacy of reform demands especially as 
 they affected Christians persisted in its 
 suicidal policy of oppression. After every 
 such demand it became more cruel and re- 
 actionary than ever. 
 
 However, there is a certain inexorable law, 
 made axiomatic by the great Irish liberator, 
 O'Connell, which we must not lose sight of. 
 When all is said, we know that in exigencies 
 of this sort "he who would be free, himself 
 must first strike the blow." And we are 
 likely to inquire if, other than by an occa- 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 65 
 
 sional humble protest or petition, the Arme- 
 nians of these modern days in any way proved 
 themselves worthy to be ranked with the 
 other heroic peoples the Greeks, the Serbs, 
 the Rumanians, the Bulgarians who through 
 storm and stress had been partly the means 
 of effecting their own liberation from the 
 Turkish yoke. 
 
 Considering that from the beginning of the 
 Turkish domination the Armenians had never 
 been permitted to bear or to possess arms; 
 considering that they were widely scattered 
 among watchful Turkish and Kurdish popu- 
 lations, it is by no means a fair question. 
 Still, it is well for us to realize that in spite 
 of these formidable handicaps and aside 
 from the so-called "revolutionary" movement, 
 undertaken only as a last resort, and then 
 with the desperate understanding that only 
 by the help of Europe could it in any way 
 avail the Armenian race, owing to the genius 
 and courage of a number of its own sons in 
 the service of Russia, did actually secure a 
 virtual emancipation from the most intolerable 
 of their wrongs, but that the fruits of this 
 victory were deliberately destroyed by the 
 
66 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 very Powers to whom they had most right to 
 look for sympathy. 
 
 It was the Russo-Turkish war of '76-'78 
 which brought to the Armenians this oppor- 
 tunity. At the beginning of the century a 
 portion of Armenia proper, the Caucasian 
 district, had come under the dominion of the 
 Czar. And the people thus freed from 
 Turkish toils sprang to a height of material 
 and moral prosperity sufficient to prove the 
 artificial nature of their retardation in the 
 interior of Asia Minor. Macler, De Morgan, 
 Lynch, Bryce, all testify to the economic 
 development of the region which they in- 
 habited, once they had obtained even a 
 measure of freedom. De Morgan states that 
 under their hands the province became within 
 a comparatively few years one of the most 
 prosperous in all Russia. 
 
 But more significant even than this demon- 
 stration of economic power was the moral 
 flowering of the people. Stimulated by their 
 own liberties, by study in the Russian 
 universities, and by contact with Russian, 
 German, and French thought, the race pro- 
 duced a succession of patriots, warriors, 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 67 
 
 thinkers, dramatists, novelists, and poets, of 
 whom any race on earth might be proud. 
 Europe, and especially France, is coming to 
 know largely through the efforts at Paris 
 of Mr. Archag Tchobanian and Professor 
 Frederic Macler, professor of Armenian at 
 UEcole des Langues Orientales Vivantes 
 something of the genius of this galaxy of 
 writers. And the English-speaking world, 
 through the labors of Miss Alice Stone 
 Blackwell, Miss Zabelle Boyajian, Mr. Robert 
 Arnot and others, is coming to know some- 
 thing of the poetry. But, as a potential 
 factor in the life of the nation, no Armenian 
 figure of the Caucasus can claim anything 
 like the significance which invests the person 
 of Loris Melikoff, confidante and advisor to 
 Alexander II, who, with other Armenian 
 generals, constituted the High Command of 
 the Russian army on the Caucasian front in 
 that momentous war. 
 
 The Turks were superior in numbers to 
 the Russians, but, under the inspired direc- 
 tion of those men w r ho felt that they were 
 defending the old home ground, they were so 
 decisively repulsed as to be constrained to 
 
68 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 comply with the vigorous but not ungenerous 
 terms dictated to them by Russia in the Treaty 
 of San Stefano. When we remember that 
 Melikoff was yet to draft a constitution for 
 Russia which Czar Alexander was on the 
 eve of proclaiming at the time of his assassi- 
 nation that he was statesman as well as 
 general, and that he was the greatest figure 
 of the victorious war, we can easily recognize 
 the influence of his hand in the sixteenth 
 article of the Treaty of San Stefano which, 
 under strong military guarantee, assured 
 redemption to the Armenians of the scandal- 
 ously misgoverned interior provinces. 
 The Article follows: 
 
 "As the evacuation by the Russian troops of the 
 territory which they occupy in Armenia, and which is 
 to be restored to Turkey, might give rise to conflicts and 
 complications detrimental to the maintenance of good 
 relations between the two countries, the Sublime Porte 
 engages to carry into effect, without further delay, the 
 improvements and reforms demanded by local require- 
 ment in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and 
 to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians." 
 
 This, of course, meant that not until 
 the reforms had been consummated would the 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 69 
 
 Russian troops be withdrawn. It was the 
 first serious attempt that had been made 
 by any European power on behalf of the 
 Armenians, although such reform had been 
 stipulated under the general heading "Chris- 
 tian" in the Treaty of Paris, and had at times 
 since been the subject of international dis- 
 cussion. That the conditions demanded such 
 drastic intervention is more than apparent 
 from such testimony as that of C. B. Norman, 
 then war-correspondent for the London 
 Times, and numerous other foreign eye- 
 witnesses: 
 
 "In my correspondence to the Times" 
 Mr. Norman writes, "I made it a rule to 
 report nothing but what came under my own 
 personal observation, or facts confirmed by 
 European evidence. 
 
 "A complete list it is impossible for me to 
 obtain, but from all sides ... I hear piteous 
 tales of the desolation that reigns throughout 
 villages deserted, towns abandoned, trade 
 at a standstill, harvest ready for the sickle, 
 but none to gather it in, husbands mourning 
 their dishonored wives, parents their mur- 
 dered children, churches despoiled and dese- 
 
70 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 crated, graves dug up, young of both sexes 
 carried off, and the inhabitants of villages 
 driven naked into the fields, to gaze with 
 horror on their burning homesteads.' 
 
 There was but a brief moment, however, 
 in which to rejoice and thank God for this 
 long-sought deliverance promised by the 
 Treaty of San Stefano. Hardly was their 
 protection assured when England, already 
 long committed to the so-called "integrity of 
 Turkey" policy in the interests of her own 
 Eastern possessions, promptly interfered and 
 demanded that the treaty drawn up by Russia 
 be revised at an International Convention. 
 Already, she had sent her fleet through 
 the Dardanelles in threat of war should Russia 
 insist upon following up her successes. 
 Russia was in no position to take up the 
 challenge, so she submitted to England's 
 dictation. The Treaty of San Stefano was 
 annulled and that of Berlin substituted. The 
 fruits of the well-earned victory of the Rus- 
 sians were effectively minimized. Incident- 
 ally, Melikoff's signal triumph on behalf of 
 his people was turned to black defeat. More 
 vulnerable than ever they had been in all 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 71 
 
 their history, the all but liberated Arme- 
 nians were handed back to their infuriated 
 tormentors. 
 
 Still there remained a hope. By the 61st 
 article of the Treaty of Berlin secured chiefly 
 through the efforts of an Armenian delega- 
 tion headed by the ex-Patriarch Khrimian 
 the Six Great Powers, England, Germany, 
 Austria, France, Italy, and Russia, had 
 agreed to become the protector of the Arme- 
 nians, although without any definite military 
 guarantee. 
 
 The Article read: 
 
 "The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out, without 
 further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded 
 by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by the 
 Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the 
 Circassians and Kurds. It will periodically make known 
 the steps it has taken to this effect to the Powers, who 
 will superintend their application." 
 
 Almost simultaneously, in secret conference 
 with the Turkish Government, England had 
 negotiated the Cyprus Convention, a treaty 
 designed to secure both her own and Turkish 
 interests against the further advance of 
 
72 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Russia. As one of the series of state docu- 
 ments which bear most strongly upon the 
 destiny of the Armenians it deserves to be 
 cited here. I quote the main article: 
 
 "If Batoum, Ardahan, Kars, or any of them shall be 
 retained by Russia, and if any attempt shall be made 
 at any future time by Russia to take possession of any 
 further territories of His Imperial Majesty the Sultan 
 in Asia, as fixed by the definitive Treaty of Peace, 
 England engages to join His Imperial Majesty the 
 Sultan in defending them by force of arms. 
 
 "In return, His Imperial Majesty the Sultan prom- 
 ises England to introduce necessary reforms, to be 
 agreed upon later by the two Powers, into the govern- 
 ment and for the protection of the Christian and other 
 subjects of the Porte, in these territories; and in order 
 to enable England to make necessary provision for 
 executing her engagement His Imperial Majesty the 
 Sultan further consents to assign the Island of Cyprus 
 to be occupied and administered by England." 
 
 Thus Russia was ousted from her position 
 as special protector of the Christians of the 
 East, and Europe collectively and England 
 particularly assumed responsibility for the 
 execution of reforms in Armenia. 
 
 Once the Russian forces were withdrawn, the 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 73 
 
 Sultan, as might have been expected, imme- 
 diately began to inaugurate a policy of re- 1 
 prisals which had for its aim nothing less than J 
 the total impoverishment and final extermina- 
 tion of the Armenian population. He rightly 
 discounted the sincerity of Europe with 
 regard to the Armenians, and decided to 
 eliminate this element whose presence and 
 whose status necessitated reform and might 
 later offer further pretext for foreign inter- 
 vention. The first and most conspicuous step 
 to this end was the organization into regular 
 cavalry of the marauding Kurdish tribes, 
 from whose depredations the Armenians had 
 especially been promised protection. These 
 were given power over their lives, honor and 
 property. Then, taxes already unbearable 
 were increased and ingeniously multiplied; 
 travel, even from town to town for business 
 purposes, was virtually prohibited; the collec- 
 tion of debts from the non- Christian popula- 
 tion was made impossible; imprisonment 
 without trial and the open or secret murder 
 of the leading men became common practices ; 
 the abduction and violation of women were 
 encouraged and connived at by the officials. 
 
74 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop, the famous 
 traveler, who visited Armenia in 1890, gives 
 this report of the conditions prevailing at that 
 time : 
 
 "On the whole," she says, "the same condi- 
 tion of alarm prevails among the Armenians 
 as I witnessed previously among the Syrian 
 (often called Nestorian) Rayahs. It is more 
 than alarm, it is abject terror, and not with- 
 out good reason. In plain English, general 
 lawlessness prevails over much of this region. 
 Caravans are stopped and robbed, travelling 
 is, for Armenians, absolutely unsafe, sheep 
 and cattle are being driven off, and outrages, 
 which it would be inexpedient to narrate, are 
 being perpetrated. Nearly all the villages 
 have been reduced to extreme poverty, while 
 at the same time they are squeezed for the 
 taxes which the Kurds have left them with- 
 out the means of paying." 
 
 In vain in the midst of this reign of terror 
 did the representatives of the people appeal 
 over and over again to the Government for 
 relief and redress. Finally, when it became 
 only too evident that they were the victims 
 of a vindictive design, they turned to the 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 75 
 
 Signatory Powers on the basis of their Berlin 
 Treaty rights. That they were justified in 
 doing this is evident from the official testi- 
 mony of the foreign consuls and ambassadors 
 in innumerable Blue and Yellow books, from 
 the protesting speeches delivered in the Euro- 
 pean, and especially in the English and 
 French parliaments, and from the representa- 
 tions which the Powers made to the Porte. 
 
 But, as we know, the Sultan, an adept in 
 intrigue, took advantage of the jealousies of 
 the Powers and played one off against the 
 other while he continued his murderous policy 
 with regard to the Armenians. There re- 
 mained to the latter but one desperate chance. 
 Some of the young men of the nation many 
 of whom had received their ideals from the 
 prophets of Europe and America organized 
 themselves into patriotic societies for the sole 
 purpose of self-defence. They managed to 
 get possession of arms and were able success- 
 fully here and there to resist the outrages and 
 depredations. Only thus, they had been told, 
 might they win the respect and attention of 
 Europe and secure her intervention. 
 
76 THE TKAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 We know what followed. The great 
 massacres of '95 and '96 are still fresh in our 
 minds. The tears for those unpunished crimes 
 are yet upon the cheek, the shame is yet upon 
 the brow, the agony is yet keen in the hearts 
 of the great army of men and women of all 
 races and nations who longed to arrest the 
 murderous debauch but lacked the power to 
 do so. The hills and valleys of the great 
 tableland, the cities of the plains and of the 
 sea coasts, even the capital city itself, dotted 
 with foreign embassies, became the scene of 
 a colossal butchery. In regions made sacred 
 by the heroic defence of the Christian faith by 
 this nation, its earliest adherent, the savage 
 Turk was allowed to work his abhorrent will 
 unchecked. The weaponless populations were 
 visited with horrors which mankind had 
 thought outgrown. 
 
 But while the funeral pyre of a nation was 
 being kindled; while a humanity which had 
 flowered nobly in spite of insuperable diffi- 
 culties was being thrown as dross into the 
 flames by barbaric and sacrilegious hands; 
 while white-haired men and women and those 
 filled with all the energy of their best years, 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 77 
 
 fathers, mothers, brides, youths, maidens, 
 and the angelic forms of little children who 
 had but opened their trusting eyes upon this 
 world, were being sent to swell the hosts of 
 martyrs to Christianity and to Freedom, the 
 old frenzied cry of "Christ or Mohammed" 
 ringing in their ears; upon the heights of old 
 Zeitoun and amid the cliffs of Sassoun, where 
 the race had preserved a scant immunity 
 from Turkish power, there thundered forth 
 the defiant voices of the ancient heroes in the 
 shouts of the brave mountaineers, who, 
 scantily armed, held the foe at bay for months 
 to the marvel of the world. 
 
 Zeitoun, a hill town of the old Rhupenian 
 dynasty, refused to surrender until formal 
 peace terms had been entered upon by Turkey, 
 at the instance of the foreign ambassadors. 
 And when at Sassoun the inevitable happened 
 and the Turks came rushing up the heights, 
 the women of the villages, with their babies 
 in their arms, calling upon God to accept 
 them as sacrifices, hurled themselves from the 
 precipices rather than fall into the debasing 
 hands of the foe. And, on the plains, the 
 mother river, Euphrates, received other hun- 
 
78 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 dreds of women and maidens who, guarding 
 their integrity as the pearl of greatest price, 
 flung their bodies to her rescuing waves. 
 
 It is no longer possible to summon up the 
 individual forms which crowd the stage. The 
 drama has burst its national bounds and has 
 become world wide, even cosmic in its char- 
 acter. We see two worlds, one of darkness 
 and one of light, struggling for birth in the 
 hearts and minds of men. The gigantic evils 
 embodied in a succession of depraved sultans 
 and temporizing world policies, made mani- 
 fest by this great crisis, present issues and 
 opportunities which call for potent and colossal 
 heroes. But we see none. The aged Glad- 
 stone's Cassandra-like warning, "To serve 
 Armenia is to serve Civilization/' evokes no 
 response, except among those who, in indi- 
 vidual capacity like the noble American 
 missionaries and other humanitarians take 
 up the great burden of terror and agony as if 
 it were their own, and harbor, comfort and 
 watch with the people, or, before the govern- 
 ments and peoples of the world, cry out the 
 story in all its shame and pity. 5 And even 
 them we cease to see. 
 
THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 79 
 
 In this moment of stupendous cataclysm, 
 when the fate not only of the Armenian 
 nation, but of Civilization itself was trembling 
 in the balance, while yet the nations had the 
 power to deal the death blow to the power of 
 Autocracy which was yet to ravage the world, 
 it is as if the spirit of the Armenian nation, 
 the prescience of these things and of the death 
 of all her children upon her, took tangible 
 form. We seem to see her rise with all her 
 glorious past upon her. We see her turn 
 horrified, dumbfounded and appealing eyes 
 upon the six mighty Powers who had prom- 
 ised to aid her. She, the Apostle of Chris- 
 tianity, and its servant and defender, she, who 
 had held back the Saracens in the days of her 
 power, and had given of the might of her sons 
 to the cause of the Crusades, she, a mother 
 of Democracy, we see standing with bare, 
 bleeding, outstretched hands in supplication 
 to those children of the West, the Six Great 
 Knights, armed to the teeth, whose navies ride 
 at will the oceans of the world, whose armies 
 patrol the earth. We see her standing thus. 
 But their great forms have become dwarfed, 
 futile. Their eyes are averted ; their ears deaf. 
 
80 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 And then, her despairing eyes full of wild 
 pleading, we see Armenia turn to America, 
 to that fair Galahad among nations with the 
 glory of his own great crusades for liberty 
 still lighting his frank brow; to America, so 
 friendly, so hospitable, so practiced in brother- 
 hood, so determined to trample the evils in- 
 herited from the Old World and to develop 
 and add to all the good; whose spirit had 
 visited her land and had created oases whither 
 the hunted souls and bodies of her children had 
 found comfort and refuge. Armenia in that 
 awful moment looks into his beautiful face. 
 She sees the young eyes appalled at the sight 
 of her great suffering; she sees the generous 
 hands extended full of bounty ; but she notices 
 that though the scars of battle are upon his 
 face, though the passion for justice is in his 
 eyes, the consciousness of his great mission 
 has not yet fully dawned, the knight is but 
 an adolescent whose moment to enter the 
 world's lists has not yet arrived. 6 
 
Chapter V 
 AFTER THE MASSACRES 
 
 FROM this time on we see the rapid work- 
 ings of the destiny which was finally to 
 overtake not only the Armenians but 
 the entire world as the result of the corrupt 
 barbarism of Turkey and of iniquitous 
 European diplomacy in the Near East. The 
 appalling catastrophe which had fallen un- 
 redressed upon the little Armenian nation 
 such is the contagion of unrebuked evil was 
 but the foreshadowing of the fate which was 
 soon to overtake the Belgians, the Serbs, the 
 Poles, and which was to exact the heavy 
 blood tribute of France, of the British 
 Empire, of Italy, and even of America, and 
 to threaten the very existence of these free 
 and powerful states. 
 
 At the time the Western governments were 
 thoroughly aware of their solemnly under- 
 taken treaty obligations with regard to the 
 Armenians, but to the worldly-wise mate- 
 rialists who were then shaping the fortunes 
 
82 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 of our world it seemed "safer" to ignore than 
 to fulfil them. One wonders if even the 
 present cataclysm has convinced statesmen 
 of this type that there are certain crimes 
 against humanity which mankind may not 
 tolerate and that the violation of this moral 
 law carries with it its own inevitable doom. 
 
 For the massacres of the Armenians did 
 more than cry out for the decent type of 
 statesmanship which today we recognize as 
 imperative. They precipitated a stupendous 
 crisis with regard to the much coveted estate 
 of the Sick Man. The vain cry of Christian 
 to Christian had revealed to the Sultan all 
 too apparently the sole basis of European in- 
 terest in the Near East. From henceforth he 
 at least had nothing to fear from pseudo- 
 Christian intervention. Hereafter, it was to 
 be simply a pitched battle for the control of 
 what Napoleon called the "Empire of the 
 World," the region "which dominates the 
 three continents upon which live ninety per 
 cent of all mankind." And the Sultan was 
 in a position to choose his partners. The 
 increasingly conflicting ambitions, the moral 
 cowardice and the venality of the Powers 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 83 
 
 and his own corresponding arrogance made 
 it only loo evident that the old semi- 
 respectable pre-massacre status could never 
 be restored, and that the diplomacy shaped 
 by the Great Crime might be hereafter as 
 conscienceless as he and his chosen partners 
 willed. j 
 
 As a matter of fact it was at this very/ 
 time that Germany, capitalizing every ele- 
 ment of the situation, even the blood of the 
 victims, openly declared herself the friend 
 and protector of the Sultan and of the whole 
 Islamic world, and began to lay the sure 
 foundation of her Drang nach Osten scheme 
 her push toward world conquest. Immu- 
 nity from European intervention, no matter 
 what his crimes, and eventually a great pan- 
 Islamic empire were the alluring enticements 
 which she offered to the Monster of Con- 
 stantinople in return for the concession to 
 build the longed-for Bagdad Railroad, so 
 well named the "spine of the present war." 
 And with such designs in prospect, the blood, 
 not only of hundreds of thousands, but of 
 millions of innocent human beings might well 
 be permitted to cry in vain. 
 
84 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 We are familiar with the ghastly farce 
 enacted by the Kaiser at Jerusalem, 
 Damascus, and Constantinople. We see 
 this successor to Frederick Barbarossa that 
 Crusader who sent the Crown to one of the 
 princes of Lesser Armenia paying equal 
 homage to the tombs of Jesus, the world's 
 Great Democrat and lover of his kind, whose 
 "kingdom was not of this world," and to 
 that of Saladin, the mighty Mohammedan 
 conqueror and chief. We hear his specious 
 words as he places a wreath upon the tomb 
 of the "august Saracen whose sword had 
 driven the Crusaders from Jerusalem forever." 
 
 "I seize cheerfully upon this opportunity 
 to express my gratitude to his Imperial 
 Majesty, the Sultan Abdul Hamid, in whose 
 sincere love for me I glory. I assure you 
 that the German Emperor will be the loving 
 friend of the great Sultan Abdul Hamid, 
 as well as of the 300,000,000 Mohammedans 
 who, dwelling dispersed throughout the East, 
 reverence him as their Caliph." 
 
 To cement this royal friendship, we see 
 gifts exchanged between the two monarchs. 
 On the one hand, all the costly Oriental 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 85 
 
 carpets and other sumptuous furniture of 
 the Palace in which the newly-made "Hadji" 
 had been entertained; and on the other, a 
 portrait of the German royal family, and a 
 costly fountain donated to the Constantinople 
 streets, still wet with the blood of 10,000 
 Armenian martyrs. To such base uses had 
 a portion of Christendom become openly 
 converted ! 
 
 But this was not all. In further evidence 
 of the infectiousness of the rampant evil of 
 this period, it is significant to note that it 
 was at this time that Russia, weary of having 
 all her "legitimate" imperial designs forever 
 thwarted, decided to emulate the West, and 
 to throw off all pretence at protecting the 
 Eastern Christians. Almost immediately she 
 began to adopt something like the Turkish 
 attitude with regard to the Armenians of 
 the hitherto happy region of the Caucasus 
 with a view to their ultimate annihilation. 
 "Armenia without the Armenians," the mur- 
 derous 1895 slogan of Lobanoff, the Russian 
 minister of Foreign Affairs, indicates the 
 trend of the new pan-Slavic policy. Russia 
 
 / 
 
86 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 for the Russians, Turkey for the Turks, the 
 world for Germany! 7 
 
 And thus the barbaric doctrine of Ruth- 
 lessness, fostered, we must admit, by the 
 dishonorable compromises and moral inertia 
 of the rest of the world, revived and spread. 
 And for the Armenians all hope was lost 
 except what they themselves might create 
 and wrest from a situation which in itself 
 was without hope. "Stranded in the East, 
 this fragment of Europe," this sublimely 
 picturesque defender of Christianity, this 
 singular advocate of Democracy and Law, 
 became at the dawn of the twentieth century, 
 prey to a legion of enemies, more insidious 
 and menacing than ever she had known in 
 the whole tragic course of her tumultuous 
 history. Never, not even in the days of 
 Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, had she faced 
 a situation so dire. Virtually, in the interests 
 of the great Imperialisms, the race had been 
 devoted to Death in the open market of the 
 world. 
 
 Of course, the Armenians themselves were 
 unaware of the portentous drama which was 
 being enacted behind the scenes. They could 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 87 
 
 see clearly enough that their hopes of an 
 European intervention had been chimerical, 
 but they could not relinquish thought of 
 an ultimate deliverance. At any rate, the 
 present necessity was to help themselves, and 
 in all their history there is nothing finer or 
 more touching than the way in which this 
 smitten and abandoned people, rallying from 
 its wounds and wrongs, somehow or another 
 recovered its morale and gradually resumed 
 its old constructive place in the general life 
 of Turkey and of the world. 
 
 The massacres had cost the Armenians 
 about a quarter of a million souls, and they 
 had been followed by a new migration, 
 necessarily limited, however, because of the 
 Sultan's determination not to let his prey 
 escape. Besides, there was an immense loss 
 in wealth. Their homes had been destroyed 
 and they had been robbed of their property. 
 Some of the oldest business houses of Con- 
 stantinople and elsewhere had been obliged 
 to go out of business because of the impov- 
 erishment of their Armenian creditors. There 
 was a vast stream of orphans and defenceless 
 old people to be cared for, homes and schools 
 
88 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 and orphanages to be built, and hospitals 
 for the sick and wounded. But this was an 
 undertaking in which warm-hearted foreign- 
 ers, and especially Americans, shared. And 
 presently out of the wreckage came clear 
 evidence that the aspiring spirit of the people 
 had been by no means extinguished. 
 
 And there was need for courage and 
 determination. For the Government had 
 become more repressive than ever; more 
 extortionate in its taxes, more severe in its 
 penalties, more scandalously indifferent even 
 to such justice as was the standard of the 
 Turkish courts-of-law. The censorship, al- 
 ready excessive, became ridiculous in its 
 watchfulness. The Kurds and Circassians 
 were still allowed to plunder the defenceless 
 towns and villages at will. The prisons and 
 dungeons were filled with Armenian victims. 
 Spies were everywhere. 
 
 To some races the alternative of submission 
 might have suggested itself, but to the 
 awakened Armenian spirit there appeared 
 only the sacred necessity for further effort. 
 Especially among the generous and enlight- 
 ened youth trained in the universities of 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 
 
 Europe and America, the feeling arose that 
 did the people of Europe really know the 
 character of the sufferings, and the nature 
 and history of the afflicted race, they would 
 not permit their governments to remain in- 
 different to the pledges of elementary reform 
 which had been made. 
 
 An energetic diplomatic propaganda was 
 therefore begun by them in London, Paris, 
 Tiflis, Leipzig, Geneva, Alexandria, Boston, 
 New York, and elsewhere, with the object 
 of "converting" Europe, and of winning the 
 active support of America. Again, as before, 
 the object aimed at was not separation from 
 Turkey, but reform. Journals were published 
 in English, French, and Armenian, and books 
 and articles were written and speeches made 
 in which the nature of the issue was elaborated 
 upon. The Armenian leaders of the patriotic 
 societies made overtures, too, to the Young 
 Turks, and offered to unite with them in 
 demanding the restoration of the constitution 
 which Odian had drawn up and which Abdul 
 Hamid had proclaimed and then revoked. 
 And, in sure token of the undying spiritual 
 vitality of the race, there sprang into pas- 
 
90 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 sionate being a new literature, a new poetry, 
 inspired chiefly by love of freedom and 
 country, and more rich and powerful, more 
 sustainedly and consciously artistic, perhaps, 
 than any that had gone before. Aharonian, 
 Siamento, Varoudjan, Toumanian, Tcho- 
 banian, and others the world will some day 
 pay its tribute to their magnificent song. 8 
 
 The scope of this brief sketch does not 
 permit individual tribute to the men of genius 
 and faith who, at a period of history funda- 
 mentally hostile to the rights of small peoples, 
 dared unreservedly to devote all their gifts 
 and resources to the furtherance of this holy 
 but desperate cause. But Europe now 
 aligned, because of German aggression in 
 the Near East, into two definite and mutually 
 hostile camps, each contending for the control 
 of Turkish territory was in no position to 
 interest herself in the internal reforms of 
 that country. Therefore, in spite of toil and 
 sacrifice and the co-operation of noble indi- 
 viduals in England, France, America, and 
 other countries, no definite progress was made. 
 The appeal on behalf of Armenia became but 
 a voice in the wilderness. 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 91 
 
 Not in all countries, however, were the 
 efforts of the Armenian patriots equally 
 abortive. By the opening years of the 
 twentieth century, the struggle for national 
 preservation in Russian Armenia had become 
 acute, pursuant to the policy entered upon 
 by Lobanoff at the time of the massacres. 
 During these years the Government of the 
 Czar attempted to bring the people into 
 complete vassalage to a general scheme of 
 Russification. The plan was to destroy the 
 national identity by depriving them of their 
 language and of their Church, and to this 
 end the schools were closed and the property 
 and revenues of the ancient Mother Church 
 at Etchmiadzin were confiscated. 
 
 A singular method of terrorization was 
 instituted by Christian Russia one which 
 smacks of the policy which had been entered 
 upon so shortly before by the government 
 of the Kaiser. The religious fanaticism of 
 the Moslem Tartars of the Caucasian region 
 was secretly inflamed by the local Russian 
 officials, and they were incited to war upon 
 their Christian neighbors, with whom they 
 had hitherto lived in peace. As a result, the 
 
92 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 
 
 whole region was soon in the grip of a 
 fanatical outburst. But the Armenians were 
 well co-ordinated, and they possessed arms. 
 Consequently they were able to defend 
 themselves, and even to overcome the Tar- 
 tar attacks. The dignified but determined 
 passive resistance of the aged Catholicos 
 Khrimian, too, had its effect. So the perse- 
 cution fell into abeyance. 
 
 A little later, we see the untiring spirit of 
 the Armenians again at work in the cause 
 of human freedom, this time in Persia. All 
 who have followed the story of Persia's ill- 
 starred but glorious attempt to take her 
 place among the constitutionally governed 
 nations, are doubtless familiar with the part 
 played by the Armenian prince, Malcolm 
 Khan, for some years Persian minister in 
 London, who is said "to have sowed the first 
 seeds of constitutional government in Persia" ; 
 and with the name of the other Armenian 
 leader, Ephrem Davidian, who later distin- 
 guished himself in the same cause. But few, 
 I believe, are aware of the heroic career 
 which preceded Davidian's short-lived victory 
 for Persia, and, consequently, for his country- 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 93 
 
 men who had come under her domination. 
 His brilliant but tragic stoiy, so symbolic of 
 the fortunes which have forever dogged the 
 footsteps of his unfortunate nation, has been 
 so admirably summarized by that remarkable 
 woman of the same race, Mrs. Diana Agabeg 
 Apcar, that it seems most fitting to let the 
 tale be told in her own thrilling words. 
 
 "In 1908," she writes, "Shah Muhammad 
 Ali Mirza was deposed and constitutional 
 government established in Persia. The 
 cordiality between the Armenians and the 
 Persians was great at that period, and 
 the leader and generalissimo of the whole 
 successful movement was Ephrem Davidian, 
 known in Persia as Ephrem Khan. He 
 escaped from Saghalien prison in 1891. 
 Fighting with a score of companions against 
 a whole Turkish regiment in Turkish 
 Armenia, these young men when hard pressed 
 crossed the frontier into Russian Armenia 
 and were there immediately seized by the 
 Russian authorities and consigned to a prison 
 in Saghalien. Escaping, Ephrem became the 
 leader of the nationalistic movement in Persia 
 in 1908, and, as is well known, not only 
 
94 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 defeated the ex-Shah's forces, but kept the 
 peace of Teheran. Ephrem was idolized 
 by the Persian Constitutionalists and when 
 assassinated by the agents of the Russian 
 government, was buried with royal honors by 
 the Persian people. ,, 
 
 There seems to be little need of dwelling 
 upon the so-called revolution which at this 
 time occurred in Turkey, and which led to 
 the dethronement of Abdul Hamid and the 
 proclamation of a constitution. The word 
 "re volution" in this connection is at best a 
 misnomer. It was an affair in which the 
 people had absolutely no part. It was simply 
 the seizure of power by a military clique 
 trained in Germany or by Germans, and 
 although it gave to the Armenians a brief 
 period of illusory hope, 9 it does not deserve 
 to be distinguished from the rule which pre- 
 ceded it, except in so far as it has proved to 
 be more scientifically cruel and destructive. 
 
 The frightful massacre at Adana in which 
 twenty thousand persons were slain within a 
 few days, the very year following the procla- 
 mation, shows only too emphatically, as some 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 95 
 
 one has said, that the "Young" Turks were 
 very like the "Old." And so it came about 
 that in a Turkey possessed of a representative 
 parliament, the Armenians, in order to obtain 
 security for "life, honor, and property," were 
 once more obliged to have formal recourse to 
 the Powers which had signed the Treaty of 
 Berlin. 
 
 The explanation of this anomalous situation 
 is not difficult to seek. There had been 
 developing among the Young Turks and their 
 followers a political credo, less ambitious, 
 possibly, than the ancient pan-Islamic tide, 
 but not less arrogant and ruthless; Turkey 
 for the Turks was but a part of the pan- 
 Turanian scheme which had come into being 
 as a result of German stimulus and example. 
 "In Parliament," says Viscount Bryce, "the 
 program took such form as a bill to make 
 the Turkish language the universal and 
 compulsory medium of secondary education" 
 a death blow to Armenian progress andj 
 nationality since "the vast majority of the 
 secondary schools of the Empire were, of 
 course, American, Armenian or Greek." But 
 regardless of the fact that the Turkish Ian- 
 
96 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 guage was barren of a literature which would 
 in any way meet the needs of the times, the 
 Young Turks insisted upon this form of 
 Ottomanization, and upon others equally 
 impossible and reactionary. "And the Arme- 
 nian deputies" to quote Viscount Bryce 
 again "found themselves opposing it in con- 
 cert with the liberal party, which included the 
 Arab bloc and stood for the toleration of 
 national individualities." In addition, the 
 Armenians had positive demands to make, 
 such as a mixed Gendarmarie open to Turks 
 and Armenians but closed to Kurds, who 
 continued to practice their old habit of brig- 
 andage and for an actual, and not merely 
 nominal, equality between Christians and 
 Moslems before the law. 
 
 But the Young Turks had become deaf to 
 all reason. Intoxicated by the "superior race" 
 idea, an altogether unfounded belief in their 
 own abilities, based in part upon centuries of 
 delusive racial privilege, had taken possession 
 of them. And as affairs proceeded, and the 
 actual administration of the Empire called 
 more and more imperatively for men of prac- 
 tical sense and ability, it maddened them to 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 97 
 
 discover that the race whom they had always 
 despised and outlawed was really the more 
 capable of performing the work of the state, 
 as well as of conducting the other affairs of 
 life. 
 
 The foundation for the jealousy which 
 took possession of them is evident from the 
 anaylses made by many European authorities, 
 among them no less a personage than Dr. Paul 
 Rohrbach, who, as an exponent of the Drang 
 nach Osten program, spent four years in 
 Turkey for the purpose of surveying the 
 situation from every point of view. During 
 this time he came to feel a very high and 
 cordial admiration for the Armenians as a 
 race, and it is evidently with a view of bring- 
 ing them to the attention of the Home Gov- 
 ernment as a valuable asset in the upbuilding 
 of the future German Eastern Empire, that 
 he dilates upon their abilities and virtues. 
 
 According to Dr. Rohrbach (writing 
 shortly before the outbreak of the war) the 
 Armenians played a part in the intellectual 
 and economic life of Turkey "entirely out 
 of proportion to their number"; the Arme- 
 nian schools supported by the voluntary 
 
98 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 offerings of the people, and exclusive of 
 all missionary establishments, exceeded the 
 Turkish schools four to one, and were much 
 better; the trades and the liberal professions 
 were in Armenian hands, and, in general, 
 the economic life of the Empire depended 
 upon them, and this "not because of a singular 
 lack of business scruple, or love of gain, but 
 through their innate capacity for labor!" 
 
 Dr. Rohrbach further states that their 
 ability to read and write Turkish, in addition 
 to their "general psychic energy and assiduity 
 for labor," accounted for the relatively high 
 number of Armenian employees in the service 
 of the Turkish administration, without whom, 
 he declares, "the machinery of the State would 
 absolutely stop." And he adds that according 
 to the testimony of the Constantinople 
 press, the ministries of the two Armenians, 
 Noradounghian and Halad j ian Internal 
 Affairs and Public Works were the only 
 ones which had accomplished anything. 
 
 But all this was beside the purpose, so far 
 as the "Home Government" was concerned. 
 Probably the plan to subdue or to wreck the 
 Armenian people had been already provi- 
 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 99 
 
 sionally formulated by Constantinople and 
 Berlin; and the two Inspectors-General 
 commissioned in 1913 by Germany and Russia 
 to investigate the Armenian grievances on 
 behalf of the Signatory Powers were doubt- 
 less merely a blind, at least so far as the 
 former was concerned. If the East was to 
 be converted into a new type of despotism 
 and the way made safe for a new tyranny, 
 it was certainly not the Armenians who would 
 play the leading and compliant part. At the 
 suitable moment, all factors hostile to such a 
 purpose must be eliminated, even though it 
 meant the annihilation of an entire race. 
 
 The shadow of the ultimate catastrophe 
 was therefore already black upon the land 
 when Germany gave the signal for the 
 universal conflagration. 
 
Chapter VI 
 IN THE WORLD WAR 
 
 THE extreme precariousness of their 
 position must have been sensed by the 
 Armenians at the moment of the out- 
 break of the war. Through the expostula- 
 tions of their representatives in the Turkish 
 parliament and elsewhere, their grievances 
 against the Young Turk government and 
 their distrust of this rule had become matters 
 of official and popular knowledge. A war 
 would give their enemy the opportunity to 
 wreak vengeance upon them. The military 
 entente between the Young Turks and Ger- 
 many was already well known and Turkish 
 participation on the German side was more 
 than a probability. Turkish societies, called 
 "patriotic," had recently sent threatening 
 letters to the Armenian Patriarch, to the 
 editors of the Armenian newspapers, to 
 Boghos Nubar Pasha, President of the 
 Armenian Delegation, and to others who 
 were helping to bring the Armenian situation 
 
IN THE vVOKLD WAK 101 
 
 before the attention of Europe. The follow- 
 ing is one of many similar documents, signed 
 by numbers of Turks, which these societies 
 had sent to the Armenian press of Constanti- 
 nople : 
 
 "We advise you not to speak any more 
 of Armenian reforms. If you do the matter 
 will become serious and we will massacre you, 
 old and young. We will eviscerate you in 
 the open streets, and you will find the former 
 massacres desirable in comparison to those 
 which we shall execute." 10 
 
 At the same time, bands of Turkish 
 "nationalists" had gone nightly through the 
 streets of the Armenian quarter, marking in 
 red and black insulting words and threats of 
 death upon the doors of the Armenian houses, 
 churches, and schools. Furthermore, just at 
 this period the two Inspectors-General com- 
 missioned by the Powers to examine into the 
 Armenian situation had already arrived! 
 
 But, aside from the actual peril of their 
 position, there were moral reasons why the 
 possibility of war between Turkey and the 
 Entente should be painful and repugnant to 
 the Armenians. By virtue of similarity of 
 
102 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 character and ideals they had always been 
 drawn to the people of France and England, 
 and to the people of Russia they were united 
 not only by a certain understanding and 
 sympathy, but, in the Caucasus, by the tie 
 of blood. To fight Russia would be to help 
 in the slaughter of their own brothers. 
 Hitherto, in all the Turco-European wars 
 except the Balkan War of 1912, in which 
 as citizens of constitutionally governed 
 Turkey they had been obliged to participate, 
 they had been spared the necessity of taking 
 the field on the side of their deadly enemy 
 because of their proscription as Christians 
 from the Turkish military service. But now, 
 if the constitution were lived up to, they 
 would, in the event of war, be obliged to take 
 up arms in defence of the despotic Young 
 Turks and the Central Powers, and on behalf 
 of principles which they had always abhorred. 
 What had they been consistently throughout 
 their history but a lance never in rest, a pil- 
 grim always on the road, a martyr forever 
 at the stake in the cause of political and 
 religious democracy? A sardonic reminder of 
 their known allegiance to these things ap- 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 103 
 
 peared in the Constantinople comic paper, 
 "Karagoz" in the early days of the war. 11 It 
 depicted two Turks in earnest discussion. 
 "Where do you get your war news?" asked 
 one. "I do not need war news," replied the 
 other. "I can follow the faces of the Arme- 
 nians I meet. When they are happy I know 
 the Allies are winning, and when they are 
 depressed I know that the Germans have had 
 a victory." 
 
 Just as there is no equivalent for the word 
 "compromise" in all their rich language, so 
 there had been no room for it in the course 
 of their hazardous national existence. It 
 was too late for them to adopt a renegade 
 policy. At best the officials and the men of 
 military age could but perform their duties 
 grimly and without show of enthusiasm, 
 hoping against hope that they might thereby 
 purchase immunity for the civilian popula- 
 tion from the D jihad, or the massacre, which 
 a general disturbance in Turkey was likely 
 to portend, and of which there were already 
 threatening rumors. 
 
 As Turkish sympathy for the Central 
 Powers grew more and more apparent, it 
 
104 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 became the one aim of the Armenian leaders 
 to dissuade the Government from joining 
 forces with these nations. As members of the 
 Turkish parliament and as Ottoman citizens 
 they tried to make it clear that such a course 
 would be fatal to the life of the Empire. 
 In this opinion some of the Turks of the 
 Conservative party are said to have concurred. 
 But when the Young Turks showed no 
 inclination to heed the advice, some of the 
 deputies of the interior provinces and other 
 Armenian leaders decided to meet in confer- 
 ence at Van and Erzeroum for the purpose 
 of determining what course, in the event of 
 war, would best safeguard the Armenian 
 population. 
 
 It is vitally important for us to realize 
 that the question of winning the Armenians 
 to the side of the Central Powers had already 
 been uppermost in the minds of the Young 
 Turks; and that at a time when so much 
 hinged upon the attitude which this or that 
 people would take, when other nationalities 
 were bargaining back and forth for terms 
 with both of the great contestants, the Arme- 
 nians of Turkey, too, had at least an ostensible 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 105 
 
 chance to barter their honor for their lives. 
 There is every reason to believe that their 
 ultimate destruction had been determined 
 upon from the outset. (See "Documents 
 presented to Viscount Grey" by Viscount 
 Bryce English Blue Book.) But the Young 
 Turks, intriguers as well as murderers, pre- 
 ferred, if possible, first to utilize their prey 
 for their own disgraceful ends. The story of 
 this attempt and its failure of accomplishment 
 reflects the sheer heroism of the Armenian 
 people and is one of the noblest episodes in 
 the annals of the war. 
 
 The scene occurred simultaneously in the 
 cities already referred to, Van and Erzeroum, 
 Van, originally founded by Semiramis as 
 a summer city, later the capital of a long line 
 of Armenian kings; a city overlooking the 
 great salt lake of Van, five thousand feet 
 above sea level; a beautiful city made more 
 beautiful by the industry of her inhabitants; 
 a city of orchards, vineyards, and gardens; 
 and Erzeroum, situated at an even higher 
 altitude and, like Van, in the center of that 
 part of ancient Armenia to the soil of which 
 the race had clung with the greatest tenacity. 
 
108 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 It was to these classic Armenian strongholds 
 that the Enver-Talaat government sent their 
 representatives for the purpose of inducing 
 the Armenian leaders, assembled there in 
 convention, to incite their brethren across the 
 Russian frontier to take up arms on the side 
 of Turkey. 
 
 The story comes to us through many chan- 
 nels, but I quote it as given in Document 21 
 in the English Blue Book already referred to: 
 
 According to the project of the Young Turks, the 
 Armenians were to pledge themselves to form legions 
 of volunteers and to send them to the Caucasus with 
 the Turkish propagandists, to prepare the way there 
 for the insurrection. 
 
 The Young Turk representatives had already brought 
 their propagandists with them to Erzeroum 27 indi- 
 viduals of Persian, Turkish, Lesghian and Circassian 
 nationality. The Turks tried to persuade the Arme- 
 nians that a Caucasian insurrection was inevitable; 
 that very shortly the Tartars, Georgians and moun- 
 taineers would revolt, and that the Armenians would 
 consequently be obliged to follow them. 
 
 They even sketched the future map of the Caucasus. 
 
 The Turks offered to the Georgians the provinces of 
 Koutais, and of Tiflis, the Batoum district and a part 
 of the province of Trebizond; to the Tartars, Shousha, 
 the mountain country as far as Vladikavkaz, Bakou, 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 107 
 
 and a part of the province of Elisavetpol; to the 
 Armenians they offered Kars, the province of Erivan, 
 a part of Elisavetpol, a fragment of the province of 
 Erzeroum, Van and Bitlis. According to the Young 
 Turk scheme, all these groups were to become autono- 
 mous under a Turkish protectorate. The Erzeroum 
 Congress refused these proposals, and advised the 
 Young Turks not to hurl themselves into the European 
 conflagration. 
 
 The Young Turks were irritated by this advice. 
 
 "This is treason !" cried Boukhar-ed-Din-Shakir, one 
 of the delegates from Constantinople: "You take sides 
 with Russia in a moment as critical as this; you refuse 
 to defend the Government; you forget that you are 
 enjoying its hospitality!" 
 
 But the Armenians held to their decision. 
 
 Once more before the outbreak of war between 
 Russia and Turkey, the Young Turks tried to obtain 
 the Armenians' support. This time they opened their 
 pourparlers with more moderate proposals, and 
 negotiated with the Armenian representatives of each 
 Vilayet. At Van, the pourparlers were conducted by 
 the provincial governor Tahsin Bey, and by Nadji 
 Bey; at Moush, by Servet Bey and Iskhan Bey; at 
 Erzeroum by the same Tahsin Bey and by others. 
 
 The project of an Armenian rising in the Caucasus 
 was abandoned. Instead, the Ottoman Armenians were 
 to unite themselves with the Transcaucasian Tartars, 
 whose insurrection was, according to the Young Turks, 
 a certainty. 
 
108 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Once more the Armenians refused. 
 
 From the moment the war broke out, the Armenian 
 soldiers had presented themselves for service at their 
 regimental depots, but they refused categorically to 
 form irregular bands. 
 
 In case of war between Turkey and Russia, they 
 said, the Armenians on both sides of the frontier must 
 do their duty by their respective governments. 
 
 Meanwhile another sinister drama was being 
 enacted on the other side of the Russian 
 frontier. When Russia learned that the Turks 
 were mobilizing, she sent representatives to 
 address the Armenians of the Caucasus and 
 to promise them that if they would help 
 her to the utmost she would guarantee future 
 autonomy to the Armenians of Turkey. 
 Word, too, is said to have come to them 
 unofficially, I believe, from the other Powers 
 of the Entente telling them that if they would 
 do all in their power to hold the Turk at bay 
 on the Eastern front all help would be forth- 
 coming from France and England. The race 
 in whose defence not one single shot had ever 
 been fired had suddenly become, because of 
 their strategic position, a determining factor 
 in that critical region one of the gateways 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 109 
 
 to India. And they were being leaned upon 
 by a world which had abandoned them in their 
 long struggle ! 
 
 The Armenians of the Caucasus knew very 
 well that the designs of Russia were funda- 
 mentally unfriendly to them, but they recog- 
 nized the world aspect of the struggle, and 
 readily agreed to organize volunteer corps to 
 help the regular army, and a committee was 
 formed at Tiflis to recruit them. But the 
 Armenian regular soldiers, to the number of 
 160,000, and the 20,000 volunteers who almost 
 immediately responded to the call, showed 
 such eagerness for action that Russia became 
 alarmed. A brilliant Armenian defence on 
 the home soil might lead to national ambition 
 and future complications. So, to the con- 
 sternation of the Armenian community, most 
 of the regulars were transferred to the Poland 
 and Galician fronts, and old Russian reservists 
 who knew nothing of this tangled mountain 
 region were sent to guard the lines. More- 
 over, Russia equipped but grudgingly the 
 Armenian volunteers and instead of sending 
 them as a compact unit, arranged to have them 
 scattered over the front. 
 
110 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 The Armenians saw that Russia was not 
 really with them. The High Command not 
 only did all in its power to make the situa- 
 tion difficult for the soldiers: it behaved in a 
 very unkind and unscrupulous way to the 
 Armenian civilian population. Still the Arme- 
 nians tried to keep their spirits. The volun- 
 teers were popular with the Russian rank 
 and file and, eager to have part in a war 
 waged against their most cruel foe, they 
 overlooked the unsatisfactory stand of the 
 Russian government. 
 
 While these events were progressing in 
 Russia, the Young Turks, infuriated by the 
 refusal of the Armenians of Turkey to 
 acquiesce in their nefarious and much counted- 
 upon Caucasian scheme, were putting the 
 loyalty of these their fellow citizens to the 
 severest tests by "requisitioning" their prop- 
 erty in a wholly wanton and ominous way, 
 and by sending battalions formed exclusively 
 of Armenians to the most exposed fronts, 
 there to be mown down by French and British 
 shells. Naturally these outrages filled the 
 Armenians with intense indignation, but in 
 general they restrained themselves, and care- 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 111 
 
 fully refrained from any act of even seeming 
 disloyalty, in order to give no pretext for 
 further reprisals. 
 
 But there was no avoiding the end that had 
 been prepared for them. It had been too long 
 an obsession of the Turkish mind. And now 
 that it was clear both to the Turks and to 
 their German accomplices that the Armenians 
 would never consent to become the tools of 
 Turco-German design, there was every reason, 
 to their mind, why it should be immediately 
 accomplished. For the first time in years 
 they felt themselves wholly free of the re- 
 straint which the attitude of Europe had 
 hitherto to some extent imposed upon them. 
 More than that, they enjoyed the full pro- 
 tection of a Power whose philosophy coincided 
 exactly with their own and whom they be- 
 lieved to be invincible. The war hung like a 
 curtain of fire between them and the outside 
 world. In the chaos of the moment they could 
 work out their intentions wholly unchecked 
 and without fear of punishment. 
 
 But unlike the days of Abdul Hamid, 
 some of the Armenians were now armed, and 
 unless they could be rendered defenceless the 
 
112 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 struggle would take on the character not of 
 massacre but of civil war, an eventuality by 
 all means to be avoided. 
 
 As a preliminary step, therefore, they 
 decided to murder the Armenian soldiery 
 throughout the country simultaneously and 
 en masse, after forming them into "labor 
 battalions" ; and at the same time to decoy 
 and murder the prominent Armenian leaders. 
 Then they would fall on the civilian popula- 
 tion, and as Talaat Bey expressed it, "put an 
 end to the Armenian question for the next 
 fifty years." It was a piece of perfectly regu- 
 lar Turco-Prussian strategy. 
 
 In less than a year the deed has been ac- 
 complished. The Armenians of Turkey to 
 the number of about a million, old and young, 
 rich and poor, and of both sexes, had been 
 collectively drowned, burned, bayonetted, 
 starved, bastinadoed, or otherwise tortured to 
 death, or else deported on foot, penniless, and 
 without food, to the burning Arabian deserts. 
 
 How shall we name the dastardly crime 
 which robbed them of life and homeland? 
 How shall we describe that catastrophe, the 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 113 
 
 detailed accounts of which, as Mr. A. P. 
 Hacobian, of London, in his book "Armenia 
 and the War," so fitly says, "unfolds to the 
 horrified gaze of mankind a vast column of 
 human smoke and anguish rising to the 
 heavens as the incense of the most fearful yet 
 most glorious mass-martyrdom the world has 
 ever seen"? To attempt to do so is it not 
 almost an irreverence to the august dead? 
 We of the powerful West, who might long 
 ago have averted all this agony and appalling 
 waste of precious human resource, had we 
 been honorable enough to fulfill even the 
 most elementary obligations of our great 
 religion what is there for us to say by way 
 of sympathetic tribute in the presence of this 
 sublime agony, this breaking of a nation's 
 body, this rending of a nation's soul? 
 
 It is for us to remember that they went to 
 their death, man, woman, and child, not only 
 as martyrs to the sacred ideal for which their 
 fathers had made immemorial sacrifices; not 
 only as victims of hideous despotism and base 
 political intrigue; but also virtually as noble 
 prisoners of war in the interest of our cause 
 which, in spite of threatening pressure, they 
 
114 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 had resolutely refused to betray. A poig- 
 nantly magnanimous climax to a singularly 
 unbefriended national career! Yet, although 
 until "the future dares forget the Past, their 
 fate and fame shall be an echo and a light unto 
 eternity," how would the great heart of man- 
 kind wish that in the midst of the flames which 
 were destroying our temporizing and mate- 
 rialistic civilization, these, the wholly innocent, 
 might somehow have been spared! 
 
 But, no, amid the smoke and glare of the 
 universal conflagration, the tragedy plunges 
 forward, and a scene from which we shrink 
 forces itself upon our eyes. Those cordons 
 of men and boys bound together and hurled 
 from precipices or thrown into the sea, or 
 bayonetted, still warm and sometimes still 
 breathing, into great trench graves which they 
 themselves had dug, or felled by the axe, each 
 in his turn, as they wait, herded in lonely 
 valley, or in prison yard, or rained upon by 
 the fire of great guns as they stand awaiting 
 "orders/' or listening to the reading of some 
 spurious proclamation; those women "praying 
 in the flames," or lying in their own and their 
 children's blood upon the hearthstones or by 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 115 
 
 the roadside; the unending procession of the 
 deported who, uprooted from their ancestral 
 home, dragged from the beautiful springtime 
 of the Armenian highlands, are driven forth 
 to the scorching deserts, there to die of 
 hunger, heat and drought; the mothers dying 
 in childbirth upon the road, or begging the 
 casual passer-by to take from them their 
 adored and lovely babies and being refused 
 even that tragic boon; those mothers who, 
 unable to carry their children, or to endure 
 the sight of their suffering, await with both 
 eagerness and dread the sight of lake or river 
 into which they may cast them as a final 
 act of mercy; those children crying for their 
 murdered parents, for their lost brothers and 
 sisters, as they too march forward to their 
 own deaths; the maidens weeping for their 
 lost lovers or struggling with the demons 
 who drag them off to slavery; all while Turk- 
 ish and German officers look brutally on, 
 and give orders to the convicts recruited 
 from the prisons for this murderous purpose 
 who herd the procession ever forward be- 
 neath the blows of their heavy goads: these 
 are but the blurred outlines of that immense 
 
116 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 hecatomb to the gods of Lust and Blood 
 which dominated the land. 
 
 But the dead will not permit us to remain 
 with them. There are other heroes who com- 
 mand our homage. In the midst of the 
 universal carnage, the civilian population of 
 certain towns and villages, raised to a pitch 
 of superhuman courage by the knowledge of 
 what threatened both them and their nation, 
 waged a defensive warfare which, considering 
 all the circumstances, may justly be regarded 
 as absolutely unmatched. In most cases, after 
 these stubborn resistances had failed for want 
 of ammunition, the inhabitants were burned 
 in their churches, or in wooden concentration 
 camps erected for the purpose, put to the 
 sword or tortured to death ; but in the districts 
 bordering the Russian frontier they sometimes 
 managed to escape by throwing in their lot 
 with the Russo- Armenian volunteers and the 
 regular Russian army, retreating or advanc- 
 ing with these as Fortune dictated. 
 
 These defenses, although part of the chain 
 which united those of Belgium, France, Italy, 
 and Serbia, were conducted under circum- 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 117 
 
 stances which recall Thermopylae, and the 
 famous sieges of antiquity. They are destined 
 to live forever in the immortal Hero-Book 
 of our battle-scarred world. In the midst of 
 a struggle carried on by means of submarines, 
 gas bombs, air ships and tanks, these pictures 
 of primitive warfare flash out upon us veri- 
 tably as from the Classic Age. 
 
 Although the records of the towns and 
 villages of each vilayet shine with deeds of 
 individual and community valor, in certain 
 spots, like Van, Sassoun, and Djibal-Moussa, 
 Armenian heroism was illustrated in more 
 commanding if not in more intensified form. 
 
 The wonderful story of Djibal-Moussa, a 
 town of Cilician Armenia overlooking the 
 Mediterranean, is bound to become a classic, 
 both because of its gallant and picturesque 
 quality, and because of the thrilling rescue 
 of the beleagured mountaineers by the God- 
 sent French flagship, Ste. Jeanne d'Arc! 
 
 The resistance of Sassoun, too, although 
 fatal in its ending, will forever enhearten 
 the souls of valiant men. Let me quote the 
 story as it comes to us in Document 22 of 
 the English Blue Book: 
 
118 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 While the "Butcher" battalions of Djevdet Bey and 
 the regulars of Kiazim Bey were engaged in Bitlis 
 and Moush, some cavalry were sent to Sassoun early in 
 July to encourage the Kurds who had been defeated 
 by the Armenians at the beginning of June. The 
 Turkish cavalry invaded the lower valley of Sassoun 
 and captured a few villages after stout fighting. In 
 the meantime the reorganized Kurdish tribes attempted 
 to close on Sassoun from the South, West, and North. 
 During the last fortnight of July almost incessant fight- 
 ing went on, sometimes even during the night. On the 
 whole, the Armenians held their own on all fronts and 
 expelled the Kurds from their advanced positions. 
 However, the people of Sassoun had other anxieties to 
 worry about. The population had doubled since their 
 brothers who had escaped from the plains had sought 
 refuge in their mountains; the millet crop of the last 
 season had been a failure; all honey, fruit, and other 
 local produce had been consumed, and the people had 
 been feeding on unsalted roast mutton (they had not 
 even any salt to make the mutton more sustaining) ; 
 finally, the ammunition was in no way sufficient for the 
 requirements of heavy fighting. But the worst had yet 
 to come. Kiazim Bey, after reducing the town and 
 the plain of Moush, rushed his army to Sassoun for a 
 new effort to overwhelm these brave mountaineers. 
 Fighting was renewed on all fronts throughout the 
 Sassoun district. Big guns made carnage among the 
 Armenian ranks. Roupen tells me that Gorioun, 
 Dikran, and twenty others of their best fighters were 
 
IN THE WOULD WAR 119 
 
 killed by a single shell, which burst in their midst. 
 Encouraged by the presence of guns, the cavalry and 
 Kurds pushed on with relentless energy. 
 
 The Armenians were compelled to abandon the out- 
 lying lines of their defence and were retreating day 
 by day into the heights of Antok, the central block of 
 the mountains, some 10,000 feet high. The non-com- 
 batant women and children and their large flocks of 
 cattle greatly hampered the free movements of the 
 defenders, whose number had already been reduced 
 from 3,000 to about half that figure. Terrible con- 
 fusion prevailed during the Turkish attacks as well 
 as the Armenian counter attacks. Many of the Arme- 
 nians smashed their rifles after firing the last car- 
 tridge and grasped their revolvers and daggers. The 
 Turkish regulars and Kurds, amounting now to some- 
 thing like 30,000 altogether, pushed higher and higher 
 up the heights and surrounded the main Armenian 
 position at close quarters. Then followed one of those 
 desperate and heroic struggles for life which have 
 always been the pride of mountaineers. Men, women, 
 and children fought with knives, scythes, stones, and 
 anything else they could handle. They rolled blocks 
 of stone down the steep slopes, killing many of the 
 enemy. In a frightful hand-to-hand combat, women 
 were seen thrusting their knives into the throats of 
 Turks and thus accounting for many of them. On the 
 5th of August, the last day of the fighting, the blood- 
 stained rocks of Antok were captured by the Turks. 
 The Armenian warriors of Sassoun, except those who 
 
120 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 had worked round to the rear of the Turks to attack 
 them on their flanks, had died in battle/' 
 
 There is a wealth of material concerning 
 Van, which the Armenians held for four 
 weeks against a German-led Turkish army. 
 To defend themselves, the civilians were 
 obliged to manufacture their own powder, to 
 construct their own mortars, and even to 
 make their own guns. We learn that they 
 succeeded in making from two to four thou- 
 sand cartridges a day, that "the blacksmiths 
 made spears to be used if necessary when the 
 ammunition was all gone"; that they dug 
 trenches and underground passages through 
 which they blew up Turkish barracks and 
 entrenchments; and that in the very midst 
 of the most furious bombardments, the 
 Normal School band played Armenian 
 national airs and the Marseillaise to enhearten 
 the fighters! 
 
 "All the people of Van, without excep- 
 tion," says an eye-witness, "worked with one 
 soul. Those who had arms and were able to 
 fight rushed to take their stand and stop the 
 Turks from entering the Armenian quarters, 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 121 
 
 and those who were able to work took spade 
 and shovel to go to strengthen the fighting 
 men's positions by constructing trenches and 
 walls. The little boys worked as scouts, the 
 women and girls undertook the care of the 
 sick and of the children and did all the cook- 
 ing and sewing for the fighters. 
 
 "To save their lives and honor all the 
 Armenians of Van had placed their services 
 at the disposal of the Military Council, who 
 awarded crosses and medals to encourage 
 those who were worthy of them. I was pres- 
 ent when a little girl received one of these 
 medals. During the retaking of a position 
 in Angous Tzor she bravely went ahead, 
 spied out the ground and brought back news 
 that the Turks had laid no traps for the 
 advancing Armenian soldiers." 
 
 The actual fighting force of Van numbered 
 only 1500 men, but by their skill and strategy, 
 no less than by their valor, and with the de- 
 voted backing of the other inhabitants, they 
 forced the enemy finally to evacuate their 
 positions. "At midnight, on the 17th of May, 
 1915," says the same eye-witness, "the town 
 criers went through the town crying * Victory.' 
 
122 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 . . . The whole city was in an uproar; some 
 went to look at the entrenchments: others to 
 look at the burned Turkish quarters; and 
 others to visit the fortress, captured that 
 night, and over which a banner waved, 
 bearing the symbol of the Cross. 
 
 "Shortly after, news came that the Russian 
 army with the Armenian Volunteers was in 
 sight. The joy of the people was boundless; 
 tears of gladness and of emotion for what 
 they had suffered during the past month 
 rolled down their cheeks as they made them 
 welcome." They fired salvos from the cap- 
 tured Turkish guns and "laid the keys of 
 the captured city and Castle at the feet of the 
 Russian General. ,, 
 
 But to the eternal infamy of the Czar's 
 government, the heroic resistance of the 
 Van and other Armenians of the region, 
 as well as the valiant efforts of the Russo- 
 Armenian volunteers, was partially undone 
 by the mysterious conduct of the Russian 
 army. The prospect of an eventual occupa- 
 tion by Russia of the Armenian plateau, as 
 arranged by a secret treaty between her and 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 123 
 
 the other Powers of the Entente later 
 published by the Bolsheviki was evidently 
 dictating a policy hostile to them. An un- 
 accountable retreat was almost immediately 
 ordered, which exposed the now defenseless 
 population either to all the ravages of a forced 
 march over the frontier or to the mercy of the 
 oncoming Turks. The obvious design was to 
 accomplish the depopulation of the country, 
 and thus to prepare the way for the Russian 
 colonization, which even now was beginning 
 to take form in the bands of Russian Cossack 
 peasants who were actually pre-empting 
 Armenian lands. 12 
 
 This shameless and terrible policy was 
 crushing to the spirits of the Armenians of 
 Russia, as well as to the already agonized 
 hearts of those still on Turkish soil. But 
 surrender was impossible, and they persisted 
 in their desperate struggle against the Turco- 
 German program. The fall of the Czar's 
 government, which in the natural order of 
 things would have been to them a blessing, 
 only aggravated and intensified their imme- 
 diate peril. They had been deprived of the 
 bulk of their own fighting men at the be- 
 
124 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 ginning of the war, it will be remembered, 
 by transfer to the Western front, and when the 
 Russian regulars were withdrawn, they were 
 thrown entirely upon their own meager 
 resources. The only recourse was to organize 
 what resistance they could, in conjunction 
 with the Georgians. 
 
 So early as May, 1917, anticipating this 
 general demoralization of the Russian army, 
 the Armenians had sent representatives 
 to Petrograd to urge upon the Kerensky 
 government the speedy return of the Armenian 
 regulars for the defense of the Caucasian 
 front. But the government could do little 
 for them. The delegates therefore formed in 
 Petrograd a committee of Armenian military 
 men for the purpose of finding ways and 
 means of effecting this end. With all their 
 efforts, however, they succeeded, in six 
 months, in transferring only 35,000 men. 
 These were joined with volunteers and formed 
 into army corps. 
 
 To add to the terrors of the situation, the 
 Tartars rose in open league with the Turks 
 and were burning bridges, cutting railroad 
 communications, and attacking the Armenians 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 125 
 
 from all sides. This was an enormous handi- 
 cap, but the Armenians none the less suc- 
 ceeded in fighting their way through and 
 holding the front against the advancing Turk- 
 ish army. 
 
 Then came the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, by 
 the stipulations of which part of Russian 
 Armenia was ceded to the Turks! This the 
 Armenians had the daring utterly to repu- 
 diate, and for a time, with the co-operation of 
 the Georgians, they continued to resist the 
 Turkish assault. Then the Georgians capit- 
 ulated, and the Armenians went on with the 
 struggle single-handed, conducting them- 
 selves so valiantly that as late as July 14, 
 1918, Mr. Balfour was able to say in the 
 British Parliament: "We follow with the 
 deepest sympathy and admiration the brave 
 resistance which the Armenians are offering 
 to the Turkish army." And although the 
 Armenians of the Erivan district were, in 
 the language of Lord Robert Cecil of the 
 British Foreign Office, "at length compelled 
 by main force to suspend hostilities" and come 
 to terms with the foe, other Armenians of the 
 Caucasus, under the leadership of Generals 
 
126 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Andranik, Nazarbekof, Pakradooni, and 
 Rostome, are continuing the fight to the 
 present hour. 
 
 And of the Armenians of Erivan, Lord 
 Robert says: "Great Britain and her allies 
 understand the cruel necessity which forced 
 them to take that step, and look forward to 
 the time, perhaps not far distant, when the 
 allied victories may reverse their undeserved 
 misfortunes"; and he acknowledges their 
 services at length, saying, among other things, 
 "that they had thrown themselves into the 
 breach which the Russian breakdown left open 
 in Asia by taking over the Caucasian front, 
 and for five months delaying the Turks' 
 advance, and that they thus rendered im- 
 portant service to the British army in 
 Mesopotamia" 
 
 While these sublime actors were playing 
 this immensely significant part, unsustained 
 by the help or fellowship of their European 
 comrades at arms, and scarcely knowing what 
 the Fates, even in the event of victory, would 
 have in store for them, but resting ever on 
 their abiding faith in Ultimate Justice, other 
 Armenians, of the Dispersion, were fighting 
 
IN THE WORLD WAR 127 
 
 with the Allied forces in the Foreign Legion 
 of France, with the English in Palestine and 
 Mesopotamia, and in the United States army. 
 And the civilian Armenians, men and women, 
 were doing all in their power, as doctors, 
 nurses, engineers, Red Cross, and Liberty 
 Loan workers, to help on the general cause of 
 human freedom. The welcome and encour- 
 agement which these received from the Allied 
 governments brought new life to their lacer- 
 ated but undying hope of an emancipated 
 Armenia a hope which became assurance 
 when America, taking the sword, announced 
 for all mankind the new international 
 Apocalypse : 
 
 "but the right is more precious than 
 peace, and we shall fight for the things 
 which we have always carried nearest 
 our hearts for democracy, for the right 
 of those who submit to authority to have 
 a voice in their own government, for the 
 rights and liberties of small nations, for 
 a universal dominion of right by such a 
 concert of free peoples as shall bring 
 peace and safety to all nations and make 
 the world itself at last free." 
 
Chapter VII 
 
 IN THE WORLD COURT 
 
 "TTTHEN Tamerlane arrived before 
 Y Y Sivas," we are told, "the pearl of 
 Armenia, thousands of children met 
 him with garlands of roses. He had both the 
 children and the roses crushed under the hoofs 
 of his horses." And on the neighboring plain, 
 called to this day "The Black Field;' he 
 erected one of his huge pyramids of skulls. 
 This was in the fourteenth century. 
 
 In 1915, the descendants of Tamerlane, in 
 union with the Government of Germany, were 
 responsible for crimes throughout the length 
 and breadth of the Turkish Empire, before the 
 magnitude, the cruel finesse, the "cold com- 
 manded lust" of which even the horrors of 
 their ancient prototype pale. Of this the 
 testimony of Signor Gorrini, Italian Consul- 
 General at Trebizond, published in the journal 
 "II Messaggero" of Rome, August 25, 1915, 
 and republished in the English Blue Book, 
 
IN.THE WORLD COURT 129 
 
 concerning the fate of the Armenians of 
 Trebizond alone would serve as ample proof: 13 
 
 "It was a real extermination and slaughter of the 
 innocents," he says, "an unheard-of thing, a black page 
 stained with the flagrant violation of the most sacred 
 rights of humanity, of Christianity, of nationality. 
 The Armenian Catholics, too, who in the past had 
 always been respected and excepted from the massacres 
 and persecutions, were this time treated worse than 
 any again by the orders of the Central Government. 
 There were about 14,000 Armenians at Trebizond 
 Gregorians, Catholics, and Protestants. They had 
 never caused disorders or given occasion for collective 
 measures of police. When I left Trebizond, not a 
 hundred of them remained. 
 
 "From the 24th of June, the date of the publication 
 of the infamous decree, until the 23rd of July, the date 
 of my own departure from Trebizond, I no longer slept 
 or ate; I was given over to nerves and nausea, so 
 terrible was the torment of having to look on at the 
 wholesale execution of these defenceless, innocent 
 creatures. 
 
 "The passing of the gangs of Armenian exiles beneath 
 the windows and before the door of the Consulate; their 
 prayers for help, when neither I nor any other could 
 do anything to answer them ; the city in a state of siege, 
 guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war 
 equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bands of 
 volunteers and by the members of the 'Committee of 
 
130 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Union and Progress'; the lamentations, the tears, the 
 abandonments, the imprecations, the many suicides, 
 the instantaneous deaths from sheer terror, the sudden 
 unhinging of men's reason, the conflagrations, the 
 shooting of victims in the city, the ruthless searches 
 through the houses and in the countryside ; the hundreds 
 of corpses found every day along the exile road; the 
 young women converted by force to Islam or exiled 
 like the rest; the children torn away from their families 
 or from the Christian schools, and handed over by force 
 to Moslem families, or else placed by hundreds on board 
 ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and 
 drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Dere 
 these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, 
 memories which still, at a month's distance, torment 
 my soul and almost drive me frantic. When one has 
 had to look on for a whole month at such horrors, at 
 such protracted tortures, with absolutely no power of 
 acting as one longed to act, the question naturally and 
 spontaneously suggests itself, whether all the cannibals 
 and all the wild beasts in the world have not left their 
 hiding places and retreats, left the virgin forests of 
 Africa, Asia, America, and Oceanica, to make their 
 rendezvous at Stamboul. I should prefer to close our 
 interview at this point, with the solemn asseveration 
 that this black page in Turkey's history calls for the 
 most uncompromising reproach and for the vengeance 
 of all Christendom. If they knew all the things that 
 I know, all that I have had to see with my eyes and 
 hear with my ears, all Christian powers that are still 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 131 
 
 neutral would be impelled to rise up against Turkey 
 and cry anathema against her inhuman Government and 
 her ferocious 'Committee of Union and Progress/ 
 and they would extend the responsibility to Turkey's 
 Allies, who tolerate or even shield with their strong 
 arm these execrable crimes, which have not their equal 
 in history, either modern or ancient. Shame, horror 
 and disgrace!" 
 
 For almost six centuries Armenia has been 
 compelled to sacrifice her children and her 
 roses her flesh and blood, her culture, and 
 the fruits of her toil to an insatiable Moloch 
 of savagery and greed, and to the later years 
 of this ordeal by blood and fire the great 
 outside world has remained, we must repeat, 
 a passive spectator. One of these mass- 
 sacrifices was exacted, as we know, so short 
 a time before the war as the year 1909, when 
 20,000 persons were massacred at Adana and 
 in its environs. But not a movement was 
 made to arrest the holocaust. Other gods, in 
 addition to those of Turkey, required then 
 their blood oblations. Now, however, the 
 vengeance which follows violated moral law 
 has finally overtaken all the world and, in the 
 vision born of agony and remorse, the world 
 
132 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 will now make to Armenia what amends it 
 can. 
 
 And what are these amends? In a word, 
 they are the restoration to the Armenian 
 people of their ancient fatherland where, in 
 the free exercise of their genius and devotion, 
 they may have the opportunity of building a 
 state which shall be worthy of the sacrifices 
 they have immemorially made for the sake of 
 religion, nationality, progress and freedom. 
 We cannot give them back their dead. But 
 we can and must make this belated act of 
 reparation. It is America's and the Allies' 
 sacred promise that justice shall at length be 
 done to the small nationalities. And to what 
 people does the world owe more than to this, 
 which veritably has been sacrificed for the 
 sins of the world? 
 
 The solution commends itself even on other 
 grounds than the all-sufficing one of justice. 
 If not to the Armenians, to whom should we 
 grant their ancient patrimony? What other 
 race installed in this region, on the borderland 
 of East and West, would serve world needs 
 so well as they, they who have been re- 
 peatedly called the "natural intermediaries 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 133 
 
 between Orient and Occident"; they whose 
 administrative ability has already been so 
 amply demonstrated in the number of states- 
 men they have given to the world, and whose 
 industrial and commercial abilities, whose 
 sobriety and perseverance, are matters of 
 common knowledge. Even in modern days, 
 have they not filled high administrative posts 
 in the service of the British Empire, of Russia, 
 Turkey, and Persia? It is acknowledged that 
 England's success in governing Egypt is 
 largely traceable to the genius of Nubar 
 Pasha who, both because of his personal gifts 
 and his Armenian origin, was able sympa- 
 thetically to interpret the needs of both East 
 and West, and to whom, upon his death, the 
 Mohammedans and Christians of Egypt 
 united to erect a monument. As ministers of 
 public instruction, as prime ministers, as 
 ambassadors and as all kinds of lesser officials, 
 they have figured successfully in the political 
 life of all these countries. And as for the 
 question of national defence, what race is 
 better able to defend order than this which 
 has proved itself the bravest of the brave and 
 which, under Russia, has never been without 
 
134 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 its distinguished warriors, from the days of 
 the general, Prince Pagratian, who was "the 
 opponent of Napoleon in 1812," down to 
 those of General Samsonoff who died on the 
 Poland front in the present war "trying to 
 relieve the strain on Paris," and General 
 Andranik and his colleagues, last in the 
 defence of the Caucasian front. The fact 
 that the Turks, by resorting to the device 
 of keeping them unarmed throughout the 
 centuries, were able to murder them at will 
 is merely a proof of Turkish cowardice. 
 Whenever they were known to possess arms 
 they were generally avoided by both Turks 
 and Kurds. In the Caucasus, Russia has 
 depended very largely upon them in the main- 
 tenance of order. It was they who con- 
 stituted, to a great extent, the gendarmerie. 
 
 Moreover, if not in a free Armenia, where 
 then shall we place this race? It is not to be 
 thought for a moment that we shall expect 
 them to live again under some Turkish 
 hegemony. To expect them to submit to the 
 authority of the would-be annihilators of their 
 nation would be to do a fundamental violence 
 to the moral nature of all mankind. It would 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 135 
 
 signify a return to that hideous pre-war 
 morality, in which fair was so often foul and 
 foul was so often fair. Even before the con- 
 clusion of hostilities the world has fully made 
 up its mind upon this point. The merits and 
 claims both of the Armenians and of the 
 Turks it has already clearly defined. The ver- 
 dict of Mr. William T. Stead that the Turk 
 is but "a barbarian encamped upon the 
 ashes of the civilizations which he destroyed, ,, 
 is only one echo from the chorus of classic 
 and contemporary British and Latin opinion, 
 while Heinrich von Treitschke's view may 
 suggest even to defeated Germany the un- 
 desirability of further alliance with, or 
 support of, this monstrous and anachronistic 
 rule. "A near future," he writes, "will, it is 
 to be hoped, blot out the scandal that such 
 heathendom should ever have established itself 
 on European soil. What has this Turkish 
 Empire done in three entire centuries? It 
 has done nothing but destroy." 
 
 For an American judgment with regard 
 to Turkey's past and future, we may turn to 
 the words of Mr. Henry Morgenthau, recent 
 American ambassador to Constantinople, who 
 
136 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 was witness to the evil power of the Turk as 
 it displayed itself in the terrible year of 1915. 
 
 "After 450 years of misrule," Mr. Morgen- 
 thau says, "the Turks at last are going to be 
 deprived of their domination over the Chris- 
 tian, Jewish, and Arabian population of 
 Turkey. There must be no maudlin senti- 
 ment or emotional sympathy about their 
 treatment. They stand convicted of whole- 
 sale murder in the first degree, of committing 
 the most atrocious crimes and beastly tortures 
 of the ages; of maintaining an unjust and 
 incompetent government. 
 
 "They have demonstrated their absolute 
 inability to govern either themselves or the 
 nations that they have conquered. 
 
 "They have never assimilated the peoples 
 whose territory they have overrun. 
 
 "They have lived all these years as para- 
 sites, maintaining their power by brute 
 strength. 
 
 "They have really given nothing to these 
 countries, no architecture, no literature, no art, 
 no progress of any kind. 
 
 "They have sapped the life-blood and the 
 energy of the occupants of these lands. 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 137 
 
 "They have deprived the people of security 
 of life and property, thereby taking away all 
 incentives to any unusual energy or to the 
 keeping in line with the progress of the time. 
 
 "In fact they have cowed the people into 
 a condition of rebellious though subdued sub- 
 mission. They have ruled by might and fear 
 and not by right and love. . . . They have 
 deprived themselves of the best part of their 
 population. They have robbed, pillaged and 
 murdered as only the most conscienceless 
 brood of barbarians could do." 
 
 On the other hand there is the record of 
 Armenia, a record, in the words of the 
 French writer, M. Emile Pignot, of "an entire 
 people bruised by the heaviest chains, lacerated 
 by the most oppressive yoke, yet standing 
 unbowed in the face of all sufferings, of all 
 tyrannies, of all betrayal, of all infamies, 
 erect upon all the Golgothas of torture, and 
 proclaiming to the world the invincibility of 
 its soul," a race whose "leaders have fallen 
 in order that from their closed eyes might 
 shine more clearly, more luminously, and more 
 imperishably, the light of their national 
 genius"; a race described by M, Deschanel, 
 
138 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 President of the Chamber of Deputies and 
 Member of the Academy, as having been able 
 "even in the shadow of its slavery," to guard 
 "the secret spring of letters, of the arts, and 
 of liberty of conscience" ; a race characterized 
 by the Honorable Andrew D. White, former 
 Ambassador to Germany and President of 
 Cornell University, as "one of the finest 
 races in the world, physically, morally and 
 intellectually"; by Viscount Bryce as "of 
 conspicuous brain power, with a capacity for 
 intellectual and moral progress, as well as with 
 a natural tenacity of will and purpose, beyond 
 that of all their neighbors"; and by Dr. James 
 L. Barton, Secretary of the American Board 
 of Foreign Missions and for eight years 
 President of Euphrates College, as "religious, 
 industrious and faithful, . . . not inferior in 
 mental ability to any race on earth." 
 
 If the future of Armenia were sure to be 
 settled solely upon the shining merit of the 
 Armenian cause, or by the universally approv- 
 ing testimony of the eminent men and women 
 of all races who have loved and defended it, 
 this little nation would scarcely need to present 
 its claims before the World Court. But in 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 139 
 
 that case neither would justice have been so 
 long, so disgracefully,, and so disastrously- 
 delayed. Both the history of the Near East 
 and the fact of the present war which has 
 ensued in large degree as a consequence of 
 this question, have revealed to us the depths 
 to which men are capable of descending in the 
 scramble for territory and power; and they 
 suggest the necessity of our being upon our 
 guard against the apologists for evil who, in 
 one form or another, are certain to make 
 themselves heard at the final settlement. 
 
 With regard to the dangers inherent in the 
 Turkish situation it may not be amiss to quote 
 a statement made by Mr. Samuel S. McClure 
 in his Obstacles to Peace; "However difficult 
 the various questions involved in the peace 
 settlement," he writes, "and no one can ex- 
 aggerate the almost insoluble questions the 
 real problem of the war is Asiatic Turkey. 
 The settlement of this question may involve 
 a continuous series of devastating wars at 
 longer or shorter intervals for generations." 
 
 This was written in 1916, when the world 
 situation wore a different aspect from that of 
 today. The Russian Revolution had not then 
 
140 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 occurred and America had not entered the 
 war, and there was no reason to suppose that 
 the partition of Turkey, along traditional 
 lines, among the victorious European powers 
 would not follow the cessation of hostilities. 
 But even today in a world made new by these 
 events, Mr. McClure's statement still stands 
 in the opinion of all who are giving thought 
 to the issues of that decisive battle of the 
 World War which we are in the habit of 
 naming the Peace Congress. The Turkish 
 Empire still presents possibilities for rivalry 
 and discord which are not common to the other 
 countries the destinies of which are now a 
 matter of world debate. Mr. McClure's words 
 are more than a statement of generally recog- 
 nized truth. They are a solemn warning. 
 They suggest the imperative necessity for a 
 determined pre-Peace Congress educational 
 propaganda which shall eliminate the possi- 
 bility of any such settlement as might lead to 
 future disaster. 
 
 We are all fully aware of the extent to 
 which Turkey, both because of her criminal 
 character and her central geographical posi- 
 tion, has already figured not only in this but 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 141 
 
 in numbers of other wars which have em- 
 broiled Europe. Should she again be the 
 occasion or the means of precipitating another 
 general war, it would probably mean the 
 destruction of Western civilization, for, as the 
 great historian Ferrera has recently said, we 
 could not survive another such catastrophe. 
 To attempt to solve this outstanding problem 
 upon the old lines of expediency and com- 
 promise would be to point the sword at the 
 very heart of Europe and America. 
 
 The drama which I have attempted swiftly 
 to trace in the foregoing sketch is destined 
 therefore to have a tremendous epilogue, since 
 upon the solution of this central problem may 
 be said to depend the fate not only of our 
 chief protagonists but of the entire world. 
 Hence this people become once more the 
 moral arbiters, as it were, of a universal des- 
 tiny; the token by which shall be registered 
 the triumph either of Democracy or Autoc- 
 racy, our victory or our defeat. 
 
 In the imperial and economic point of view 
 of the baser elements of Europe as well as in 
 that of the Turkish despotism, the region so 
 
142 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 recently contested for will still be an object 
 of extreme covetousness. And by evidence 
 already at hand we may anticipate the battle 
 which these factors will wage on their own 
 behalf. Claims will be put forward both in 
 the interests of the present ruling race and 
 of the foreign imperialists and exploiters; 
 and in case it seems better to serve these 
 designs, Turkey may be cited as calling for 
 quite another solution from that which should 
 be applied to other disintegrating empires 
 Russia or Austria for example; and Turkey- 
 in-Europe, as requiring settlement by a code 
 different from that demanded by conditions 
 in Turkey-in-Asia. We are concerned only 
 with the solution based upon the grounds of 
 absolute justice which alone, we hope, the 
 peoples of the world will tolerate. And for 
 guidance we can do no better than to turn 
 to Gladstone, that prophet of the Near 
 Eastern question whose noble and inspired 
 warnings Europe ignored, to humanity's in- 
 estimable cost. Mr. Gladstone is discussing 
 this same issue as it presented itself following 
 the Treaty of Berlin: 
 
 "My meaning, Sir," he says, "was that, 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 143 
 
 for one, I utterly repelled the doctrine that 
 the power of Turkey is to be dragged to the 
 ground for the purpose of handing over the 
 Dominion that Turkey now exercises to some 
 other great State, be that State either Russia 
 or Austria or even England. In my opinion 
 such a view is utterly false, and even ruinous, 
 and has been the source of the main difficulties 
 in which the Government have been involved, 
 and in which they have involved the country. 
 I hold that those provinces of the Turkish 
 Empire, which have been so cruelly and un- 
 justly ruled, ought to be regarded as existing, 
 not for the sake of any other Power whatever 
 but for the sake of the populations by whom 
 they are inhabited. The object of our desire 
 ought to be the development of those popula- 
 tions on their own soil, as its proper masters, 
 and as the persons with a view to whose wel- 
 fare its destination ought to be determined." 
 This point of view is, of course, none other 
 than the one to which both the Allies and 
 America have solemnly committed themselves. 
 It is simply another lamp, a glorious one 
 from the Past, to show the way. If this 
 majestic estate called the Turkish Empire is 
 
144 THE TRAGEDY OF ^ARMENIA 
 
 to be rescued permanently from the despoiler 
 and the conquest seeker, it will be because a 
 settlement has been found adapted to the just 
 and legitimate interests of all the native 
 populations, Armenian, Syrian, Greek, Arab, 
 Jew, and even Turk. What form this general 
 and complicated settlement may take is not 
 here a matter under speculation. But the 
 solution called for by the Armenian claims is 
 fortunately not so indefinite or so involved as 
 to prohibit prophecy. While it may be true 
 that, as Mr. Arnold Toynbee has said, the 
 frontiers of the future Armenian state "cannot 
 be forecast, they must include the Six Vilayets 
 so often promised reforms by the Concert 
 of Europe and so often abandoned to the 
 revenges of the Ottoman Government as 
 well as the Cilician highlands and some outlet 
 to the sea." To these provinces will naturally 
 be added the Armenian territory acquired by 
 Russia. 
 
 The question as to whether there are still 
 enough survivors to populate such a state can 
 most fortunately, in spite of the repeated 
 attempts at national annihilation, be answered 
 in the affirmative. It will not be necessary 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 145 
 
 for us to lean wholly upon the noble 
 suggestion offered by M. Paul Doumer, late 
 President of the French Senate, who recently 
 said that should lack of numbers be urged by 
 the enemy as an obstacle to an independent 
 Armenian state "the dead must be counted 
 with the living." The paucity of numbers is 
 not so dire as to endanger in any way 
 the Armenian hope. When Greece finally 
 achieved her liberation from the Turkish yoke 
 her numbers had been reduced to about 
 500,000, and Serbia and Bulgaria were equally 
 decimated when they achieved theirs; and yet 
 these states have stood and their populations 
 have multiplied. Armenia, with the Russian 
 provinces, with Persia, and with the Disper- 
 sion to draw upon, together with the refugees 
 in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Egypt and 
 Palestine, and the Armenians of Constanti- 
 nople and Smyrna, who have in general been 
 spared, is numerically in a stronger position 
 than were any of the Balkan states. To de- 
 fraud the Armenians of their independence 
 because of the losses they have sustained, or 
 for any other reason, would be not only to 
 commit a monstrous outrage, but actually to 
 
146 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 accomplish the very end designed by their 
 arch enemies, to drain the brimming cup of 
 their long sacrifice in company with these 
 criminals. This the world will never consent 
 to do, and it is with a high hope of a just and 
 complete deliverance that Armenia will pre- 
 sent herself at the World Court. 
 
 It will not be the first time that this Figure 
 has presented itself before an International 
 Congress. But whereas in the past she came 
 as an unknown supplicator, as an alien 
 champion of a long forgotten cause still in 
 her quaint Crusader's dress to throw herself, 
 alas, in vain, upon the chivalry of the Great 
 Powers, her sisters in religion and race; one 
 marvels to record, that tomorrow she will 
 come, her unsurrendered cross still upon her 
 breast, as defender-at-arms of the victorious 
 cause of World Democracy, its last defender 
 at the farthest outpost of the field of war in 
 that long embattled region: a mysterious figure 
 still, like one risen from the dead: a nation 
 without a state, without navy, and even with- 
 out army in the ordinary sense, a nation whose 
 banner is scarcely known to any but her own 
 
IN THE WORLD COURT 147 
 
 children; and yet the nation which, in propor- 
 tion to numbers and resources, has paid the 
 highest impost of life and treasure in the whole 
 gigantic conflict. But for all the heroism of 
 her gallant, her exalted sons and daughters 
 she will wear no sword. In her right hand 
 there will be a higher symbol of her might 
 the palm of her long martyrdom. 
 
 Will the nations assembled there understand 
 the full significance of this sublime Figure as 
 she makes her plea for justice? Will they 
 defend her from the Powers of Chaos and 
 Darkness which have sought to destroy her 
 in their rapacious desire to possess themselves 
 of her inheritance? Will they uphold the 
 spiritual verities of which she is the symbol, 
 and in the perfect triumph of which alone lies 
 the peace and safety of the world? 
 
 Armenia will seek no crown or sceptre, nor 
 will there be in her eyes the fire of revenge 
 or lust for conquest. As throughout her his- 
 tory, so will she still aspire for freedom, for 
 culture, for progress and for peace, for all 
 that man holds good. The nations of the 
 world, assembled in that great Council, will 
 surely at last understand the grandeur, the 
 
148 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 pity and the meaning of her sacrifice, and by 
 setting the seal of their approval upon her 
 aspirations for democracy and light, they will 
 indeed pay grateful tribute to the memory of 
 her martyrs and bear testimony to their faith 
 in the ideals for which those martyrs died. 
 
NOTES 
 
 Note 1 
 
 The Aryan origin of the Armenian race is recognized 
 by all authorities. We are indebted to Herodotus for 
 the specific story of their former connection with Europe. 
 He says that the Armenians are a branch of the 
 Phrygians. The Phrygians, according to tradition, 
 before their migration to Asia lived in the neighborhood 
 of Macedonia. Strabo makes a statement which sug- 
 gests an even more picturesque origin when he says that 
 Armen, a native of Armenion, a city of Thessaly, sailed 
 in company with Jason toward the country afterwards 
 named for him. Rawlinson seems to be the only author- 
 ity who does not trace the Armenians to Europe. His 
 theory is that Armenia itself was the original home of 
 the Aryan peoples. The foundation for their own 
 tradition that they are descendants of Thorkom, or 
 Togarmah, a grandson of Japhet, may, for want of 
 historical evidence, remain forever merely a matter for 
 interesting speculation. 
 
 Note 2 
 
 In one of the earlier chapters of "The Beginnings of 
 New England," Mr. Fiske, speaking of "the first bold 
 and determined manifestation of the Protestant temper 
 of revolt against spiritual despotism," says: 
 
 "From Armenia in the ninth century the Manichnpan 
 
150 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 sect of Paulicians came into Thrace and for twenty 
 generations played a considerable part in the history 
 of the Eastern Empire. They were known in Bulgaria 
 as Bogomiles. In the Greek tongue they were called 
 Cathari, or 'Puritans.' . . . 
 
 "Their ecclesiastical government was in the main 
 Presbyterian, and in politics they showed a decided 
 leaning toward democracy. They wore long faces, 
 looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were 
 terribly in earnest. Of the more obscure pages of 
 mediaeval history, none are fuller of interest than those 
 in which we decipher the westward progress of these 
 sturdy heretics, through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, 
 and thence into Southern France, where, toward the 
 end of the twelfth century, we find their ideas coming 
 to full bloom in the great Albigensian heresy. . . . 
 After forty years of slaughter, these Albigensian 
 Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated, but the spirit 
 of revolt against the hierarchy continued to live on 
 obscurely, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and 
 vigorous life. . . . This Protestant reformation, from 
 the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is coincident 
 with the transfer of the world's political center of 
 gravity from the Tiber and Rhine to the Thames and the 
 Mississippi." 
 
 Referring to Armenian Protestantism, the late Dr. 
 Robert Chambers of Western Turkey Mission, writing 
 in the Missionary Herald makes the following inter- 
 esting statement: "Some of the first to discover and 
 attach themselves to the American missionaries in the 
 
NOTES 151 
 
 early part of the last century in Armenia were descen- 
 dants of the Armenian Paulicians." 
 
 Note 3 
 Research on Armenian art is still in its infancy. Even 
 the manuscript literature has not yet been fully studied. 
 Of the art of illuminating, which advanced to a high 
 degree of skill and beauty in the Middle Ages, we know 
 comparatively little, although it is beginning to be made 
 the object of special study by certain modern scholars. 
 The gold and silversmiths' art, said to have attained its 
 height in the tenth century, has continued to find 
 fascinating and original expression even to recent days. 
 I have seen an exquisite silver handleless cup, made by 
 an artisan of the city of Van, famous for its silver- 
 smiths, which exhibited evidence of marked genius. It 
 was covered with very chaste, minute, and delicately 
 wrought geometric designs. In the center, supported by 
 a pivot, was a fish, covered with carven scales and very 
 flexible, which, when the cup was filled with liquid, 
 seemed to swim. A very suggestive article upon the 
 subject of Armenian decorative art may be found in 
 the International Encyclopedia. 
 
 Note 4 
 With regard to the physique of the Armenians we have 
 much enlightening testimony from persons who have 
 traveled and lived among them. The veteran missionary, 
 Dr. Joseph K. Greene, author of "Leavening the 
 Levant," attributes their survival as a people to their 
 physical, no less than to their moral vigor: 
 
152 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 "The first reason of their survival/' he says, "is that 
 the Armenians inhabited, not the hot and feverish plains 
 of Mesopotamia but the broad and elevated plateau of 
 northeastern Asia Minor. Even as far south as Van, 
 their ancient capital, their country was 5,500 feet above 
 sea level, with the snow-capped peak of Ararat only 
 one hundred miles to the northeast. Like the inhab- 
 itants of the Caucasus the Circassians they were a 
 ruddy, vigorous, healthy race. Their land was fertile 
 and produced fine cereals and fruits, with abounding 
 flocks and herds. Theirs was a life of toil, a perpetual 
 fight with nature, but they breathed pure air and were 
 well fed. Hence the Armenians were a hardy and 
 handsome race, and were capable of great endurance." 
 
 Even when subjected to the trials of migration, they 
 continue to preserve their aspect of physical well being. 
 Some twelve or more years ago, I heard that veteran 
 orator, the late Mary A. Livermore, open an address 
 to an audience of Armenians assembled in Faneuil Hall, 
 Boston, with the following striking but very seriously 
 spoken words: "This is the handsomest audience I have 
 ever stood before." I myself have never addressed an 
 Armenian audience without receiving an impression of 
 their morally illuminated vitality. And frequently after 
 lectures to American audiences, school teachers have 
 come up to me to express both their admiration and love 
 for the beautiful Armenian children in their care, and 
 their indignation that such splendid human material 
 should be so recklessly wasted. 
 
NOTES 153 
 
 Note 5 
 I cannot let the occasion pass without paying my 
 personal tribute to the really chivalrous men and women 
 in Europe and America who have consecrated them- 
 selves to the Armenian cause. The names of Gladstone, 
 Bryce, Dillon, Lynch, Zangwill, MacColl, the Duke 
 of Argyle, Hamlin, Christie, Greene, Chambers, Bar- 
 ton, Usher, Yarrow, Knapp, Trowbridge, Shattuck, 
 Wheeler, Townsend, Leroy-Beaulieu, Berard, Anatole 
 France, Jaures, Clemenceau, Pressense, Quillard, de 
 Contenson, de Roberty, Rolin-Jaquemyns, Favre, Black- 
 well, Barrows, Howe, Clement, Garrison, Storey, Ames, 
 Mead, Dole, and others whose names will suggest them- 
 selves to those familiar with this history, are destined 
 to be immortally linked with the names of the Arme- 
 nian patriots and to glorify the walls of the future 
 Armenian Pantheon. 
 
 Note 6 
 The fact that only two years later America rescued 
 Cuba from the tyranny of Spain is proof in itself that 
 had she not been, in a way, inhibited by her traditional 
 policy of non-interference in European affairs, she 
 would have flown to arms in defense of Armenia, re- 
 gardless of the fact that she was under no "treaty" 
 obligations whatever. Had she been true to the vision 
 of her prophets, : !ie would, even as it was, have taken 
 that step, and by assuming the rdle of moral leadership 
 which she now enjoys, have added to her own spiritual 
 force the strength of popular England, France, Italy, 
 and who knows what other countries. 
 
154 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Note 7 
 Is it anything more than a coincidence that the 
 persecution of the Jews in Russia took on at this time 
 the violent character of earlier days that Kishinef and 
 Kief followed Van, Our fa, and Sassoun? 
 
 Note 8 
 
 Even now, the privilege of acquaintance with some of 
 the works of these, and others of the poets, is available 
 through Miss Blackwell's admirable translations which 
 appear in a volume entitled "Armenian Poems," now on 
 sale at the office of the Armenian and Syrian Relief 
 Committee at 3 Joy Street, Boston. The price of this 
 book is $1.00 and the entire proceeds are devoted by 
 Miss Blackwell to the Relief Fund. 
 
 Note 9 
 
 The genuineness of the Armenian desire to co-operate 
 with the Turks in the new government is testified to by 
 all foreigners who were in Turkey at the time of the 
 Proclamation. One of these, Mr. Herbert Adams Gib- 
 bons, author of "The New Map of Europe," etc., re- 
 marks, concerning both the antecedents and consequences 
 of the "revolution," that the Young Turk agitators had 
 been encouraged and even sometimes supported by 
 Armenians, who "took them in, fed them and clothed 
 them and subsidized their propaganda." 
 
 "I was present at the overthrow of the Hamidian 
 regime," he writes. "I saw the Young Turk exiles re- 
 turning triumphant to Constantinople and Smyrna and 
 
NOTES 155 
 
 Beirut. I saw Mohammedan Mullahs and Ulema 
 fraternize with Armenian priests. I saw them riding 
 in carriages together. I saw them kiss Christians on 
 the cheeks and call them brothers. Then, immediately, 
 remorselessly, and without hesitation the Young Turks 
 turned on those who had helped them and whom they 
 had used to bring about the Revolution. Not many 
 months of the new regime had passed before we who 
 were on the ground in Turkey realized that there was 
 absolutely no difference between Young Turks and Old 
 Turks. By 'peace and liberty' the Young Turks meant 
 peace and liberty for Moslems and not even for all 
 Moslems ! Albanian and Arab Moslems were given to 
 understand as fully as Armenians and Greeks and 
 Syrians and Jews that Turkey was Turkish." 
 
 Note 10 
 For this document and for the information contained 
 in the paragraph which follows it, as well as for other 
 material, I am indebted to Mr. Mikael Varandian's ex- 
 cellent book, "L'Armenie et la Question Armenienne." 
 
 Note 11 
 I have taken the description of the cartoon in 
 "Karagoz" verbatim from "Armenia and the War" by 
 Mr. A. P. Hacobian of London. To his moving and able 
 presentation, I also owe other material as well as much 
 inspiration. 
 
 Note 12 
 Mr. A. P. Hacobian, in his book "Armenia and the 
 War," quotes the following from the Retch, organ of the 
 
156 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Constitutional Democrats in Russia, issue of July 28, 
 1916 (O. S.): 
 
 "The scheme of settling Russian emigrants in the 
 occupied parts of Turkish Armenia, recently discussed 
 in the Duma, is being energetically carried out. This 
 matter has been the subject of a lively discussion 
 between the Emigration and Military authorities. 
 Investigations are in progress, not only in the districts 
 near the frontier, but also further afield, the fertile 
 Mush valley being the object of special attention. 
 Agricultural Battalions have been in course of organiza- 
 tion since last autumn and already number 5,000 men. 
 More will be found presently. Armenians and Georgians 
 are excluded. The task of these young arms is to culti- 
 vate the fields on which investigations have been carried 
 out, under the supervision of agricultural experts, in 
 order to facilitate the provisioning of the army. The 
 question of emigrating the families of these men is also 
 under consideration. 
 
 "Side by side with this scheme there exists another 
 scheme of settling Cossacks in Turkish Armenia, on 
 similar lines to what has already been done in Northern 
 Caucasus with good results. Those who have conceived 
 these schemes have in view the creation of a sufficiently 
 broad zone inhabited by Russians, separating the Rus- 
 sian Armenians from the Turkish Armenians. 
 
 "Armenian refugees are gradually returning to their 
 country and resuming the work of cultivating their lands. 
 They usually settle in the villages that have suffered 
 least, their own villages having been totally ruined. 
 
 "To avoid confusion, the Grand Duke Nicholas 
 
NOTES 157 
 
 issued a Ukase in March last, warning these returned 
 refugees to keep themselves in readiness to vacate these 
 districts on the establishment of Russian Civil Adminis- 
 tration. In the same Ukase the Commander-in-Chief 
 of the Caucasian Army has decreed that the vacant lands 
 in the plains of Alashkert, Diadin and Bayazid may be 
 given in hire up to the time of the return of their rightful 
 owners. General Yudenitch has issued orders, however, 
 prohibiting the settlement in these places of any other 
 immigrants except Russians and Cossacks. Only those 
 natives are permitted to return who are able to prove 
 ownership of land or property by legal documents. This 
 arrangement makes it impossible for the natives (Arme- 
 nians) to return to their homes because it is ridiculous 
 to speak of title-deeds when dealing with land in Turkey ; 
 and as for other documents which prove ownership, 
 these always get lost during flight. 
 
 "In the above three plains, also in parts of the plain 
 of Bassain, the surviving native inhabitants are debarred 
 from returning to their homes and resuming their peace- 
 ful occupations." 
 
 Note 13 
 The complicity of the German government with that 
 of the Turk in the crime against the Armenians is evi- 
 dent even on the face of things, since the Turks would 
 not have dared to work in opposition to the will of their 
 masters. Nor could they have secured the active co- 
 operation of the German officers in Turkey had there 
 not been strict accord between them. Such a statement 
 as this by Signor Gorrini, in the interview already 
 
158 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 referred to, is typical of many directly corroborative 
 statements made by foreign and other eye-witnesses 
 who were in Turkey during the perpetration of the 
 crime: " . . . the Germans and the Committee (of 
 Union of Progress) constitute the one genuine, solid 
 organization at present existing in Turkey a masterly 
 and most rigorous organization, which does not hesitate 
 to use any weapon whatever; an organization of 
 audacity, of terror, and of mysterious, ferocious 
 revenge." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 For information concerning Armenian history, the 
 Armenian question, the Near Eastern question, travel 
 in Armenia, Armenia in the War, Armenian history 
 and art, the reader is referred to the following works, 
 to which the author wishes to acknowledge her indebted- 
 ness. 
 In English: 
 
 The History of Vartan, and of the Battle of the 
 Armenians: an Account of the Religious Wars 
 between the Persians and Armenians, by Eliseeus, 
 Bishop of the Amadunians. Translated from the Arme- 
 nian by C. F. Neumann. London, 1830. 
 
 History of Armenia, by Father Michael Chamich. 
 Translated from the original Armenian by Johannes 
 Avdall. Calcutta, 1827. 
 
 Researches in Armenia, by E. Smith. Boston, 1833. 
 
 Travels and Researches in Mesopotamia and 
 Armenia, by W. F. Ainsworth. London, 1842. 
 
 Travels in Armenia, by A. H. Layard. London, 
 1853. 
 
 The Armenian Church History, Liturgy, Doc- 
 trines and Ceremonies, by E. F. Fortescue. London, 
 J. T. Hayes, 1872. 
 
 Armenia and the Armenians, by R. D. J. Issaver- 
 dens. Venice, 1878. 
 
160 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Life and Adventures in Trebizond, Erzerum, 
 Tabriz, by A. Vambery. London, 1886. 
 
 Armenia and the Campaign of 1877, by C. B. Nor- 
 man. London, 1878. 
 
 The Armenians, or the People of Ararat, by M. 
 C. Gabrielian. Allen, Lane & Scott, Philadelphia, 1892. 
 
 Twenty Years of the Armenian Question, by 
 James Bryce, in his Transcaucasia and Ararat, pp. 
 446-525. 1890. 
 
 Armenia and the Armenians, by E. J. Dillon (a 
 section in his Russian Characteristics). 
 
 The Rule of the Turk, by Frederick D. Greene. 
 Putnam, New York, 1896. 
 
 Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, by E. M. 
 Bliss. 
 
 England's Responsibility toward Armenia, by 
 Malcolm McColl. Longmans, London, 1895. 
 
 Through Armenia on Horseback, by George H. 
 Hepworth. Dutton, New York, 1898. 
 
 Armenia: Travels and Studies, by H. F. B. Lynch. 
 Longmans Green, London, 1901. 
 
 The Armenian Awakening: a History of the 
 Armenian Church, by Leon Arpee. University of 
 Chicago Press, 1909. 
 
 On the Cross of Europe's Imperialism: Armenia 
 Crucified, by Diana A. Apcar. Fukuin Printing Co., 
 Yokohama, 1918. 
 
 The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman 
 Empire, 1915-16. Documents presented to Viscount 
 Grey by Viscount Bryce, with a preface by Viscount 
 Bryce. English Blue Book, London, 1916. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 161 
 
 Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation, 
 by Arnold J. Toynbee. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 
 1915. 
 
 The Blackest Page of Modern History; Events 
 in Armenia in 1915, the Facts and the Responsibili- 
 ties, by Herbert Adams Gibbons. Putnam, New York 
 and London, 1916. 
 
 The Story of the Armenian Dynasties, by James 
 L. Barton. The Independent, March 5th, 1899. 
 
 The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near 
 East; Problems of Peace, by Herbert Adams Gibbons. 
 Century, New York, 1917. 
 
 Armenia and the War, by A. P. Hacobian, with a 
 preface by Viscount Bryce. Hodder & Stoughton, Lon- 
 don and New York, 1917. 
 
 The Turkish Empire: its Growth and Decay, by 
 Lord Eversley. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1917. 
 
 Travel and Politics in Armenia, by Noel E. Bux- 
 ton and Harold J. Buxton, with an introduction by 
 Viscount Bryce and a contribution on Armenian History 
 and Culture by Aram Ram. Smith, Elder & Co., Lon- 
 don, 1914. 
 
 Armenia Past and Present: a Study and a Fore- 
 cast, by W. L. Williams, with an introduction by T. P. 
 O'Connor, M. P. P. S. King & Son, Ltd., London, 1916. 
 
 The Pan-German Plot Unmasked, by Andre 
 Cheradame, with an introduction by the Earl of Cromer. 
 Scribners, London, 1917. 
 
 Two War Years in Constantinople: Sketches of 
 German and Young Turkish Ethics and Politics, by 
 
162 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 Harry Stuermer. Translated from the German by E. 
 Allen and the author. Doran, New York, 1917. 
 
 The War and the Bagdad Railway: the Story of 
 Asia Minor and its Relation to the Present Con- 
 flict, by Morris Jastrow, Jr. Lippincott, 1917. 
 
 The Near East from Within, anonymous. Dutton, 
 New York, 1918. 
 
 The Golden Maiden and Other Folk and Fairy 
 Tales told in Armenia, by A. G. Seklemian, with an 
 introduction by Alice Stone Blackwell. Helman Taylor 
 Co., Cleveland, O., 1898. 
 
 Armenian Poems, rendered into English verse by 
 Alice Stone Blackwell. Armenian Relief Comm., 3 Joy 
 St., Boston, 1917. 
 
 Armenian Legends and Poems, compiled and illus- 
 trated by Zabelle C. Boyajian. With an introduction by 
 Viscount Bryce, and a contribution on Armenia, its 
 Epics, Folk Songs and Mediaeval Poetry by Aram Raffi. 
 Dent, London, 1916. 
 
 Armenian Literature, with an introduction by Rob- 
 ert Arnot. Revised Edition, London, 1901. 
 
 Armenian Poems: Metrical Version, by Robert Arnot. 
 London, 1901. 
 In French: 
 
 Histoire d'Armenie, by Moses de Khoren. Trans- 
 lated from ancient Armenian by P. E. Le Vaillant de 
 Florival. Venice, 1841. 
 
 L'Armenie et la Question Armenienne, by Mikael 
 Varandian. With a preface by Victor Berard. Kava- 
 nagh et Cie, Laval, France, 1917. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 163 
 
 Contes Armeniens, Traduits de l'Armenien Mod- 
 erne, by Frederic Macler. Leroux, Paris, 1903. 
 
 Mekhitaristes de Saint Lazare, Histoire d'Arme- 
 nie, Litterature Armenienne, by Paul Emile Le 
 Vaillant de Florival. Typographic Armenienne de Saint 
 Lazare, Venice. 
 
 L'Armenie Chretienne et sa Litterature, by Felix 
 Neve. C. Peters, Louvain, 1886. 
 
 L'Armenie, son Histoire, sa Litterature, son Role 
 en l'Orient, with an Introduction by Anatole France, 
 by Archag Tchobanian. Societe du Mercure de France, 
 Paris, 1897. 
 
 Poemes Armeniens, Anciens et Modernes, Precedes 
 d'une Etude de Gabriel Mourey sur la Poesie et l'Art 
 Armeniens, by Archag Tchobanian. Librairie A. 
 Charles, 1902. 
 
 Chants Populaires Armeniens, Preface de Paul 
 Adam, by Archag Tchobanian. Societe d'Editions 
 Litteraires et Artistiques, Paris, 1903. 
 
 Petite Bibliotheque Armenienne, Publiee sous la 
 Direction de Frederic Macler. Paris. 
 
 L'Orient Inedit Legendes et Traditions Arme- 
 niennes, by Minas Tcheraz. Leroux, Paris, 1912. 
 
 Etudes sur la Miniature Armenienne, by Seraphin 
 Abdullah and Frederic Macler, Paris, 1909. 
 
 Au Milieu des Massacres Journal de la Femme 
 d'un Consul de France en Armenie, by Emilie Carlier 
 Juven, Paris, 1903. 
 
 Also to the following journals: The New Armenia, 
 949 Broadway, New York; The Armenian Herald, Old 
 
164 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 
 
 South Building, Boston; La Voix de VArmenie, 30 Rue 
 Jacob, Paris. 
 
 (A complete bibliography of the Armenian dis- 
 asters, compiled by Prof. W. W. Rockwell, may be had 
 from the American Committee for Armenian Relief, One 
 Madison Avenue, New York City, price 10 cents.) 
 
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