their sweetness on the desert air of Deir-el-Zor, slave markets must be
established at these collecting stations. There would be plenty of
girls, and prices would be low, but the reverend ministers of Allah the
God of Love, the Ulemas, the Padis and the Muftis, should be accorded a
preferential tariff. Indeed they should pay nothing at all; they should
just choose a girl and take her away, and, with the help of Allah the
God of Love, convert her to the blessed creed. No one was too young for
these lessons.... A little abstemiousness would not hurt these pampered
Christians, so when they set out on their marches they need not be
provided with rations or water. Perhaps some might die, but Talaat had
no use for weaklings at his agricultural colonies. Nor must there be any
poking and prying on the part of those interfering American
missionaries; and so Talaat Bey put all the agricultural colonies out of
bounds for foreigners....

There was no hurry over these deportations, for the plea of military
exigencies, which had caused the deportations in Armenia itself to be
terminated by massacre with a rapidity almost inartistic, did not apply
to Armenians so far from the seat of war. Their picnics could be
conducted quietly and pleasantly in the leisurely Oriental manner. Even
the men need not be murdered absolutely out of hand. Strong young
fellows might be stripped and tied down and then beaten to death by
bastinadoing the feet till they burst, or by five hundred blows on the
chest and stomach. Their cries would mingle with the screams of their
sisters in the embrace of Turkish soldiers. And, talking of embraces, if
a woman was desirable, she need not walk all the way to Deir-el-Zor, but
by embracing Islamism be transferred to a harem. But these were details
that might be left to individual taste: there were no precise
instructions save that no Armenian men must be discoverable in the
Ottoman Empire at all, and no women save those who had become Turkish