We shall
have to kill them all."
"Yes, wipe them out--the accursed infidels!"
The Turks hate the Armenians because their religion, Islam, teaches
them to hate the "infidel" Christians; they are of a foreign race and
foreign religion in countries ruled by Turks, though the Armenians
were there first, and the Armenians are cleverer business men than the
Turks, who hate to see their subjects richer than themselves, and hope
by massacre to seize Armenian wealth.
Yet all the time, as the wounded Turks were sent from the Gallipoli
front back to Konia, the Armenian nurses in the hospital there were
healing them. But the Turkish Government gave its orders. Vile bands
of Turkish soldiers rushed down on the different cities and villages
of the Armenians.[64] One sunny morning a troop of Turkish soldiers
came dashing into a quiet little Armenian town among the hills. An
order was given. The Turks smashed in the doors of the houses. A
father stood up before his family; a bayonet was driven through him
and soldiers dashed over his dead body; they looted the house; they
smashed up his home; others seized the mother and the daughters--the
mother had a baby in her arms; the baby was flung on the ground and
then picked up dead on the point of a bayonet; and, though the mother
and daughters were not bayoneted then, it would have been better to
die at once than to suffer the unspeakable horrors that came to them.
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