in order that people may not hear their
screams and know of their agony. Soldiers are stationed round the
prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles. It is needless to relate
that many died of these tortures. When they die, the soldiers cry, "Now
let your Christ help you."' A second caravan of five hundred families
left Erzerum: at Baiburt they were joined by another contingent deported
from that town, and the account that follows is based on the information
supplied by the Rev. Robert Stapleton, an American minister at Erzerum,
and by an Armenian woman who was among the deported, and whose life was
spared on her embracing Islamism.

The convoy numbered, when it left Baiburt, some 15,000 persons, and it
reached Erzinjan in safety. There the massacres had already taken place,
and the women and children had been deported, for they found no
Armenians there. But the convoy had not yet arrived at its goal, and it
started out again moving south by east till it came to Kamakh. There
bands of Kurds descended on them, and in the space of seven days every
male above fifteen years of age, including an aged priest of ninety, was
killed. Thereafter a pilgrimage of women, as from Kheiban, moved
southwards across plain and mountain, and every day its numbers were
diminished, for the youthful and the good-looking were carried off by
brigands. At night they were halted outside villages, and the gendarmes
and villagers took what they chose. Many died from hunger and
heat-stroke: others were left by the wayside. When they came to the
banks of the river Kara-Su there was a debauch of horror. Women and
girls and little children were raped and mutilated, and the children who
still survived were thrown into the river. Those who could swim were
shot. Thereafter the movements of this caravan are hard to trace.
Probably there was then but little left of it. But others followed on
the same route 'through fields and hillsides dotted with swollen and
blackened corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench.'
Some of them reached Mosul, some reached Aleppo, another collecting
station, where, by the mouth of other witnesses, we shall hear of them
again.

Corroborative and additional evidence is given by the Danish Red Cross
nurses who, with a noble disregard of their own safety, accompanied one
of these caravans from Erzerum to Erzinjan. They speak of the massacres
at Kamakh, of the killing by the river, and of a _battue_ through the
co