Protestant community. The translation of the Bible led them also into
educational work; they laid the foundations of secondary education in
Western Asia, and their schools and colleges--still the only
institutions of their kind--are attended by Gregorians as well as
Protestants, Moslems as well as Christians, Moslem girls as well as
boys. As they opened up remoter districts they added medicine to their
activities, and their hospitals, like their schools, have been the first
in the field. And all this has been built up so unassumingly that its
magnitude is hardly realised by the Americans themselves. In the three
Turkey Missions, which cover Anatolia and Armenia--the whole of Turkey
except the Arab lands--there were, on the eve of the War, 209 American
missionaries with 1,299 native helpers, 163 Protestant churches with
15,348 members, 450 schools with 25,922 pupils; Constantinople College
and 6 other colleges or high schools for girls; Robert College on the
Bosphorus and 9 other colleges for men or boys; and 11 hospitals.

The War, when it came, seemed to sweep away everything. The Protestant
Armenians, in spite of a nominal exemption, were deported and massacred
like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the boys and girls were carried
away from the American colleges, the nurses and patients from the
hospitals; the empty buildings were "requisitioned" by the Ottoman
authorities; the missionaries themselves, in their devoted efforts to
save a remnant from destruction, suffered as many casualties from typhus
and physical exhaustion as any proportionate body of workers on the
European battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists congratulated themselves
that the American work in Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a
lecture by a member of the German _Reichstag_, who had declared himself
"opposed to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire," a
Constantinople newspaper[41] wrote: