inconvenient for Moslems to live in a village with so many corpses
about. At another place they came to a shambles, where Armenian
soldiers, deprived of their arms, and sent to make roads, had been
slaughtered: at another there were three gangs of labourers, one Moslem,
one Greek, and one Armenian. These latter were guarded. Presently, as
they proceeded along their road, they looked round and saw that the
Armenian gang was being formed up by itself, a little off the
highroad....

And so the ghastly record went on all over Armenia. At one place only,
the town of Van, was any resistance organised. There, after the massacre
had begun, some 1500 Armenians got hold of arms (probably many of these
men were soldiers who had not yet had their arms taken from them), and
for the space of twenty-seven days defended themselves against five
thousand Turkish troops, till the Russian advance relieved them. During
that advance Armenian refugees, into whose districts the massacres had
not yet penetrated, fled for refuge to the invading army, and in all
some 250,000 Armenians under its protection crossed in safety the
Russian frontier into Trans-Caucasia. How many died on the way from
hunger and exhaustion is not known. Cholera, dysentery, and spotted
fever broke out among them, and the path of their passage was lined with
dead and dying. Companies of Kurds made descents upon them, taking toll
of their maidenhood, but, with the Russian line to protect them at their
rear, they struggled on out of the cemetery and brothel of their native
country, and out of the accursed confines of that hell on earth, the
Ottoman Empire, leaving behind them the murdered myriads of their
husbands and their sons, their violated wives and daughters. Through
incredible hardships they passed, but, unlike the other pilgrimages we
have briefly traced, they moved not towards death, but towards safety
and life, and their dark steps were lightened with Hope.