and slaughtered. For two days the massacre continued, and by the end of
the second day the Armenian question was solved as regards Mush.

In the surrounding villages the same Prussian thoroughness was observed,
and out of all the inhabitants of the plain 5000 only seemed to have
survived, who fled to Sasun (there to be subsequently massacred in
1916), while a few from outlying villages escaped to the Russian troops.
In certain villages the girls and young women were given to the Kurd
soldiery, who raped them publicly in the presence of their families, not
sparing girls of eight and ten years of age, who then, bleeding and
violated, were shot in company with the old women, for whom the Kurds
(inspired by Allah, the God of Love) had no use. Elsewhere, as the story
of a deported woman from Kheiban tells us, the women guarded by Kurdish
troops were driven out of their villages, leaving behind the corpses of
the men and of old women who could not walk, and for days were marched
along the roads, nearly naked, under the fierce heat of the July sun.
Once every other day they were given bread, but all did not get it, and
many fell exhausted by the wayside, and were either whipped to their
feet again or allowed to lie down and die. As they passed through
villages Kurds would come out and rape a girl or two, and when they
halted at night their guards would come among them.... Some few escaped;
the rest, in dwindling company, went on through days of blinding sun and
nights of shame till at last there were only a few remaining. It was not
worth while going farther, for the work of Enver Pasha was nearly done,
and the rest were pushed into the river. One alone survived, who could
swim, and she, with her two-year-old baby on her back, got across the
stream and made her way to a village where were a party of Armenians who
had escaped massacre. She arrived there at midnight, and at first they
thought she was a ghost. To them she told her story of the outraged and
ever-dwindling caravan of helpless women and girls driven onwards all
day beneath the smiting arrows of the sun, and encamped by the wayside,
where they halted with their barbarous guards and their lusts for a
terror by night. Of them none but this one was left, who had carried her
baby with her every step of that infernal pilgrimage. Two days
afterwards he died from want of nourishment, and before the week was out
the mother fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, a