Page:Red Rugs of Tarsus.djvu/12

PREFACE the way one puts off going back to a house one has not entered since a loved one died. To this day we have lived up to an agreement made back in those days, and my husband and I have never told each other the worst we know about the atrocities committed by the Turks.

But recent events in Armenia brought it all back again. My indignation, and a sense of duty and of pity, transcended all personal feelings. I lived again that night in Tarsus, when we—seven defenseless women, our one foreign man a brave young Swiss teacher of French, and 4,800 Armenians waited our turn at the hands of the Kurds.

Massacres had begun again, a thousand times worse than before. Other American women were in the same untold peril that I had been. The whole Armenian people were marked for extermination. Now, as then, help had to come. But from where? What could I do? I could not go out there. I had my four babies. I had four hundred and fifty French [viii]