[Footnote 1: At Angora a similar refusal on the part of the Governor
resulted in his dismissal, and the same thing happened at Konia and at
Kutaia.]

Here the method employed was deportation: the victims were murdered, not
in the town itself, but were given orders to leave their homes, and
under guard march (for no conveyances were given them) to other
districts. The first company was to go to Diarbekr. All these, with the
exception of one man and forty women, were murdered on the first day's
march. The remainder reached Kharput, which was another station or
collecting place for the deported. A German eye-witness tells us what
fate waited them. 'They have had their eyebrows plucked out, their
breasts cut off, their nails torn off; their torturers hew off their
feet, or else hammer nails into them as they do in shoeing horses. This
is all done at night-time, 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