he number
and capacity of the vacant houses were telegraphed to Constantinople,
occupiers from the discontented townsfolk and natives of Thrace were
assigned to them. Sometimes there would be a big school building to give
away as well, but that was not always so, for it might be more
convenient to assemble Armenians there for purposes of registration or
so forth, and then, if it happened to catch fire, why Enver would
understand that such accidents would occur. Among other careful and
well-thought-out instructions came the order that, when possible, the
murders should not take place in the town, but outside it, for clean
Allah-fearing Moslems would not like to live in habitations defiled by
Christian corpses. But, above all, there must be thoroughness; not a man
must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman who must not drag her
outraged body, so long as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to,
or rather towards those 'agricultural colonies,' as Talaat Bey, in a
flash of whimsical Prussian humour, called them. One was advantageously
situated in the middle of the Anatolian desert at the village of
Sultanieh. There, for miles round, stretched the rocks and sands of a
waterless wilderness, but no doubt the women and children of this very
industrious race would manage to make it wave with cornfields. Another
agricultural colony, by way of contrast, should be established a couple
of days' journey south of Aleppo, where the river loses itself in
pestilential and malarious swamps. Arabs could not live there, but who
knew whether those hardy Armenians (the women and children, of them at
least who had proved themselves robust enough to reach the place) would
not flourish there out of harm's way? After the swamps one came to the
Arabian desert, and there, a hundred miles south-east, was a place
called Deir-el-Zor; wandering Arab tribes sometimes passed through it,
but, arrived there, the Armenians should wander no more. In those arid
sands and waterless furnaces of barren rock there was room for all and
to spare. Sultanieh, the swamps, and Deir-el-Zor: these were the chief
of Talaat Bey's agricultural colonies.

There must be collecting stations for these tragic colonists, centres to
which they must be herded in from surrounding districts: one at
Osmanieh, let us say, one at Aleppo, one at Ras-el-Ain, one at Damascus.
And since it would be a pity to let so many flowers of girlhood waste
their sweetness on the desert air of Deir