plateau, numbered from two to three thousand men, women, and children,
only two or three hundred survivors arrived here in the south. The men
were slaughtered on the way, the women and girls, with the exception of
the old, the ugly and those who are still children, have been abused by
Turkish soldiers and officers.... Even when they are fording rivers they
do not allow those dying of thirst to drink. All the nourishment they
receive is a daily ration of a little meal sprinkled on their hands....
Opposite the German Technical School at Aleppo, a mass of about four
hundred emaciated forms, the remnant of such convoys, is lying in one of
the caravanserais. There are about a hundred children (boys and girls)
among them, from five to seven years old. Most of them are suffering
from typhoid and dysentery. When one enters the yard, one has the
impression of entering a madhouse. If one brings food, one notices that
they have forgotten how to eat.... If one gives them bread, they put it
aside indifferently. They just lie there quietly waiting for death.'

Dr. Niepage wrote this report in the hope of saving such as then (1915)
survived. No notice whatever was taken of it, and his postscript,
written in May 1916, records the fact that 'the exiles encamped at
Ras-el-Ain on the Bagdad Railway, estimated at 20,000 men, women and
children, were slaughtered to the last one.'[1]

[Footnote 1: It is right to add that at Aleppo an officer called Bekir
Sami guarded 50,000 Armenians whom he had collected from neighbouring
districts, who were threatened with massacre, and I find that a German
missionary states that there were 45,000 Armenians alive in Aleppo. This
forms confirmatory evidence, but at the same time there is nothing to
show that they were not subsequently deported to Deir-el-Zor. In this
case it is highly improbable that any survive.]