Judged:
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Ramsden Hartill
The Bobbs-Merrill Companv, Indianapolis (1926).
[Memoirs of an Armenian officer who participated in the Armenian massacres of Turks]
Ohanus Appressian
page 20 (second paragraph)
"Our men armed themselves, gathered together and advanced on the Tartar section of the village. There were no lights in the houses and the doors were barred, for the Tartars suspected what was to happen and were in great fear. Our men hammered on the doors, but got no response; whereupon they smashed in the doors and began a carnage that continued until the last Tartar was slain. Throughout the hideous night, I cowered at home in terror, unable to shut my ears to the piercing screams of the helpless victims and the loud shouts of our men. By morning the work was finished."
page 15 (second paragraph)
"The Tartars [Muslims] were, for the most part, poor. Some of them
lived in villages and cultivated small farms; many of them continued
in the way of life of their nomadic forefathers. They drove their
flocks and herds from valley to valley, from plain to mountain, and
from mountain to plain, following the pasturage as it changed with
the seasons. They ranged from the salt desert shores of the Caspian Sea far into the mighty Caucasus Mountains. Even the village Tartars are a primitive people, only semi-civilized.
I can see now that we Armenians frankly despised the Tartars, and,
while holding a disproportionate share of the wealth of the country,
regarded and treated them as inferiors."
page 202
"We closed the roads and mountain passes that might
serve as ways of escape for the Tartars and then
proceeded in the work of extermination. Our troops
surrounded village after village. Little resistance
was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts into heaps
of stone and dust and when the villages became
untenable and inhabitants fled from them into fields,
bullets and bayonets completed the work. Some of the
Tartars escaped of course. They found refuge in the
mountains or succeeded in crossing the border into
Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the
whole length of the borderland of Russian Armenia from
Nakhitchevan to Akhalkalaki from the hot plains of
Ararat to the cold mountain plateau of the North were
dotted with mute mournful ruins of Tartar villages.
They are quiet now, those villages, except for howling
of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the
scattered bones of the dead."
p. 203 (second paragraph)
"One evening I passed through what had been a Tartar village. Among the ruins a fire was burning. I went to the fire and saw seated about it a group of soldiers. Among them were two Tartar girls, mere children. The girls were crouched on the ground, crying softly with suppressed sobs. Lying scattered over the ground were broken household utensils and other furnishings of Tartar peasant homes. There were also bodies of the Muslim dead."
p. 204 (first paragraph)
"I was soon asleep. In the night I was awakened by the persistent crying of a child. I arose and went to investigate. A full moon enabled me to make my way about and revealed to me all the wreck and litter of the tragedy that had been enacted. Guided by the child's crying, I entered the yard of a house, which I judged from its appearance must have been the home of a Muslim family. There in a corner of the yard I found a women dead. Her throat had been cut. Lying on her breast was a small child, a girl about a year old."
Taurus