ABMENIAN MASSACBE3 258 ARMENTIEBES gan, many Armenian women were seized by Turkish officers and officials for their harems. Others were sold in the slave- market to Moslem purchasers only. Boys and girls in large numbers were also sold as slaves, sometimes for as low as two or three dollars. Other boys were delivered to the dervishes to be made Mussulmans. Some idea of the thorough and remorseless fashion of carrying out the massacres may be obtained from the instance of Trebizond. Here the Ar- menian residents were hunted out from house to house and driven in a great crowd down the streets to the sea. Here they were all put aboard sailing-boats, carried out into deep water and thrown overboard and drowned. Almost the en- tire population of Trebizond, numbering nearly 10,000 souls, was wiped out. Ab- solutely fiendish methods were employed on occasion. At Kouroukhan, in the search for arms, one man was shod like a horse, and another done to death by placing a red-hot iron crown on his head. The treatment of the women was un- speakable. At Sivas, the terminus of the Anatolian railway to Erzerum, the sol- diers like famished wolves consumed everything they found, and they out- raged every woman they saw. In the last week of June and early in July the massacres began on a large scale throughout the province. All the male adult population were led away from their women and herded together into camps or prisons, and then massacred in small batches in some neighboring val- ley. At Mattepe, an hour's ride east of Sivas, 20 Armenian officials in the Gov- ernment service were hacked to pieces. At Hubash, east of Sivas, 3,800 Arme- nians of the neighborhood were pole-axed, bayonetted, or stoned in blood-curdling circumstances. At Cotni, a village con- taining 120 Armenian families, bands of criminals just released from prison glo- ried in the exploit of having killed every male above twelve, and outraged every female above the same age. The women of Malatia were stripped naked, and amil the jibes and jeers of the rabble were led on their way into the Mesopo- tamian desert. Many of these unfortu- nate women actually went mad; others employed painful means to end their lives. Throughout the province of Sivas 150,000 Armenians were killed or de- ported — the latter being equivalent to massacre, as hardly any escaped death by starvation. From May to October of 1915, the Turkish Government steadily pursued its program of extermination. A general order for deportation of every Armenian to Mesopotamia was sent to every prov- ince in Asia Minor, and no exceptions were made for the aged, the ill or even women in pregnancy. Only the rich and the best-looking women and girls were allowed the opportunity to accept Islam- ism — and very few of them did so. The time given to depart was two to six hours, and nothing but food and bed- ding was to be taken along, and only so much as each person could carry. The journey consumed from three to eight weeks, and very few survived it. When they passed through Christian villages where the deportation order had not yet been received, the travelers were not allowed to receive food or ministra- tions of any sort. The sick and the aged and the children fell by the roadside and did not rise again. In the neighborhood of two hundred thousand of the Armenian population managed to escape to the Caucasian bor- ders and took refuge under the standard of Russia. Lord Bryce estimated that four-fifths of the entire nation had been wiped out, and added, "there is no case in history, certainly not since the time of Tamer- lane, in which any crime so hideous and upon so large a scale has been recorded. The Armenian atrocities have been called 'the blackest page of modern history.* '* A final report of the Armenian and Syrian Relief Committee, published at the close of the year 1915, showed thou- sands dying in the concentration camps along the Euphrates chiefly of starva- tion. ARMENIAN REPUBLIC. The Turk- ish peace treaty handed to the Ottoman delegates in Paris May 11, 1920, had as one of its conditions the recognition by Turkey of Armenia as a free and inde- pendent state. It was also stipulated that Turkey should consent to accept the arbitration of President Wilson as to the frontier in the provinces of Erzerum, Trebizond, Van, and Bitlis, and to the ac- cess of Armenia to the sea. The de facto existence of the Armenian Republic had already been recognized by the Supreme Council of the Allies, in January, 1920, and by the United States in April of the same year. The Republic, whose exist- ence had been self-proclaimed in May, 1918, is governed by a Parliament and by a Cabinet of six ministers, one of whom acts as Minister-President. The latter post was held in 1920 by Al Kha- tissian, who had been formerly Mayor of Tiflis under Russian control. ARMENTIERES, a town of the de- partment Nord, France, on the river Lys, near the Belgian frontier and about ten miles west-northwest of the gn^eat manu-
