BRITAIN TIMES TO SAVE THE ARMENIANS

Evening Star, Issue 16848, 25 September 1918, Page 3

BRITAIN TIMES TO SAVE THE ARMENIANS

" One of the best things that is being done iu Bagdad just now is the relief of Armenian women and children who have survived the massacres and are now living in Mussulman families," writes the British, official eve-witness with the army in Mesopotamia. " They are being gathered into hostels financed by the British Government, and their own people are looking after them. A visit_ to one of these, institutions and a talk with the refugees there furnish a. convincing arraignment against the Turkish Government? Tho inmates are all young, many of marriageable age, and a great number of children under six have already forgot leu (heir language and their faith. "There is a girl of ten from a village near Erzerum. She and her family started on donkeys, with a. few of Jthcir belongings, but in three days the Kurds had left them nothing, and they had to walk. The gendarmes were very pleasant to them in their homes, and told them that they would be given new land to cultivate and that their journey would not be long. The first assurance, as they guessed, was visionary. In the second the gendarmes did not "lie. For many of them it was all over on the third day. Two or three hundren of the men were separated from the women and killed, shot or cut down with the sword. " The main features of all the massacres were much the same. The emigrants, if they were not killed on the road, were taken to some depot, where they were kept a few days. Here they found a larjje camp, where quickly tho rationing became a difficult question. Then 'notice' came from Constantinople that refugees of a certain distrct had been allotted hind for cultivation, and they are started on a fresh journey. This, they knew, was probably a death sentence, but they nourished a thin hope. For the first haltday they were generally safe, a-s murder on a large scale is deprecated near a town. Nobody, for example, saw anyone killed in Trebizond, but a few clays after tlw) Armenians had left tho city their bodies came floating down the river. The desert is a non-conductor. What is done there leaves only a vague rumor. At Aleppo and Rns-el-Ain German officers stalked side by side with these spectres of famine and murder and death, and not a linger was raised or a word said. 'Tt is impolite to interfere.' is the German watchword."