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ARMENIA AND THE NEAR EAST
304
Cilicia, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia the Armenian Christians
were driven forth on their death march ; the work was done
systematically, clearing out one district after another, whether
the population happened to be near the scene of war or
hundreds of kilometres away from it. There was to be a
clean sweep of all Armenians. As the majority of men had
already been tåken for war work, it was chiefly a matter of
turning women, children, and the aged and crippled out of
house and home. They were only given a few days’ or hours’
notice. They had to leave behind all their property : houses,
fields, crops, cattle, furniture, tools, and implements. Every
thing was confiscated by the Turkish authorities. The things
they managed to carry with them, such as money, jewellery,
or other valuables, and even clothes, were subsequently
tåken away from them by the gendarmes ; and if any of them
had been allowed to take their wagons and draught animals,
the gendarmes appropriated them on the way. The poor
creatures were rounded up from the different villages and
driven in long columns across the mountains to the Arabian
desert plains, where no provision had been made for
the reception and maintenance of these herds of starving
wretches, just as nothing had been done to keep them
alive on the march. The idea was that those who did not
succumb or get killed on the way should at any rate die of
starvation.
As soon as the columns had fairly started, the callous
indifference of the guards turned into vicious brutality. The
few men and elder lads were assembled, tåken aside and killed.
The women, children, and old people were driven on, suffering
agonies of hunger and thirst ; the food, if there were any, was
scanty and bad ; those who could not keep up were flogged
on till they collapsed, or were killed. Gradually the columns
became smaller and smaller, as hunger, thirst, disease, and
murder did their work. Young women and girls were raped
or sold by auetion in places where the Moslem population had
assembled ; 20 piastres (35.) was paid for a girl who had not
been violated, 5 piastres fød.) for one who had been violated
or for a widow, and children went for practically nothing.
Often bands of tyetas and Kurds swooped down upon the
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