Page:Martyred Armenia - El-Ghusein.djvu/16

14 told me that the gendarmes with them had brought them to places where there was no water, refusing to tell them where water was to be found until they had received money as the price. Some of them, who were pregnant, had given birth on the way, and had abandoned their infants in the uninhabited wastes. Most of these women had left their children behind, either in despair, or owing to illness or weakness which made them unable to carry them, so they threw them on the ground; some from natural affection could not do this and so perished in the desert, not parted from their infants. They told me that there were some among them who had not been used to walk for a single hour, having been brought up in luxury, with men to wait on them and women to attend them. These had fallen into the hands of the Kurds, who recognize no divine law, and who live on lofty mountains and in dense forests like beasts of prey; their honour was outraged and they died by brutal violence, many of them killing themselves rather than sacrifice their virtue to these ravening wolves.

We then proceeded in carts from Serûj to El-Raha (Urfa). On the way I saw crowds going on foot, whom from a distance I took for troops marching to the field of battle. On approaching, I found they were Armenian women, walking barefoot and weary, placed in ranks like the gendarmes who preceded and followed them. Whenever one of them lagged behind, a gendarme would beat her with the butt of his rifle, throwing her on her face, till she rose terrified and rejoined her companions. But if one lagged from sickness, she was either