Hamah, herded together in a way which moved compassion.

After my arrival at Aleppo, and two days' stay there, we took the train
to a place called Ser-Arab-Pounari. I was accompanied by five Armenians,
closely guarded, and despatched to Diarbekir. We walked on our feet
thence to Seruj, where we stopped at a _khan_ [rest-house] filled with
Armenian women and children, with a few sick men. These women were in a
deplorable state, as they had done the journey from Erzeroum on foot,
taking a long while to arrive at Seruj. I talked with them in Turkish,
and they told me that the gendarmes with them had brought them to places
where there was no water, refusing to tell them where water was to be
found until they had received money as the price. Some of them, who were
pregnant, had given birth on the way, and had abandoned their infants
in the uninhabited wastes. Most of these women had left their children
behind, either in despair, or owing to illness or weakness which made
them unable to carry them, so they threw them on the ground; some from
natural affection could not do this and so perished in the desert, not
parted from their infants. They told me that there were some among them
who had not been used to walk for a single hour, having been brought up
in luxury, with men to wait on them and women to attend them. These had
fallen into the hands of the Kurds, who recognize no divine law, and who
live on lofty mountains and in dense forests like beasts of prey; their
honour was outraged and they died by brutal violence, many of them
killing themselves rather than sacrifice their virtue to these ravening
wolves.

We then proceeded in carts from Seruj to El-Raha (Urfa). On the way I
saw crowds going on foot, whom from a distance I took for troops
marching to the field of battle. On approaching, I found they were
Armenian women, walking barefoot and weary, placed in ranks like the
gendarmes who preceded and followed them. Whenever one of them lagged
behind, a gendarme would beat her with the butt of his rifle, throwing
her on her face, till she rose terrified and rejoined her companions.
But if one lagged from sickness, she was either abandoned, alone in the
wilderness, without help or comfort, to be a prey to wild beasts, or a
gendarme ended her life by a bullet.

On arrival at Urfa, we learned that the Government had sent a force of
gendarmes and police to the Armenian quarters of the town to collect
their arms, subsequently d