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ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
308
By order of the same minister only the Armenian children
under five years of age were to be spared. They could be
brought up as good Turks.
On August 31, 1915, Tala’at Bey declared to the German
ambassadors that " La question arménienne n’existe plus."
His statement was fairly correct, inasmuch as nearly all the
deportations had by then been carried out. Little remained
but to see that any survivors of the death marches were
wiped out, too. As we have seen, no attempt was made to
receive or feed them ; they were merely collected in concen
tration camps on the edge of the Arabian desert, practically
without food and without any chance of earning a living.
In January 191 6 between five and six thousand Armenians
from Aintab were sent " into the wilderness " ; and in April
14,000 deportees were massacred in the camp at Ras ul Ain.
By order of the Kaimakan, companies numbering 300-500 were
conducted every day by bands of Circassians to the river,
ten kilometres away, and there killed, their corpses being
thrown into the water. 1
At Meskne on the Euphrates, east of Aleppo, where the
Armenians were starved to death in one of the great concentra
tion camps, 55,000 people, according to Turkish figures, lie
buried. It is estimated that during 191 5 60,000 deportees
were sent to Der es Zor on the Euphrates ; and the majority
of them disappeared. On April 15, 191 6, 19,000 were sent
in four batches to Mosul, three hundred kilometres across the
desert; but only 2,500 arrived on May 22nd. Some of the
women and girls had been sold to Bedouins on the way ;
the rest had died of hunger and thirst. In July 1 9 1 6 20,000 were
deported to Der es Zor ; eight weeks later, according to the
testimony of a German officer, only a few artisans were left.
The rest had disappeared—they had been sent off in batches
of two or three hundred at a time to be killed by Circassian
bands. But death by starvation was still worse ; and an
eyewitness has related that 1,029 Armenians died of it during
two and a half days that he spent at Bab.
There are descriptions by eyewitnesses of the scenes among
these starving and dying people which are so full of heart-
Cf. Lepsius, op. eit., p. 256.
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