Dying Mothers See Babes Hurled Into Fire, Bryce Report on Armenian Massacres Says; Many Kill Selves to Escape From Turks

London, November 26-Viscount Bryce to-night made public details of further Armenian massacres, which in a letter accompanying them, he says, ‘surpass in horror, if that were possible, what has been published already.’

‘I feel,’ his letter continues, ‘that such crimes ought to be exposed to the utmost, and that the charity of other nations will more than ever be drawn to the unhappy refugees when it is known what their friends and fellow countrymen have suffered.’

Viscount Bryce says the details confirm and amplify the ghastly history of deportations by which Armenians in Northern and Eastern Anatolia were driven to a death of flendish cruelty.

The first part of the evidence, he says, was received by the Committee of Inquiry in the United States and the second part comes from an Armenian at Tiflis, who received it from refugees who escaped from regions where the events happened.

‘The sufferings of the peasants and the mountaineers in the regions of Van, Mush and Sanum,’ Viscount Bryce says, ‘seem to have been even more terrible than were those of the peaceful town folk described in Part 1 of the report-Every successive piece of evidence increases the horror of the story and confirms the dreadful certainty of its truth.

‘These atrocities were not produced by imagination. Many of them are vouched for by several coincident testimonies.

They all are in keeping, and the evidence is most complete, and some of it most terrible. At this present phase of events the civilized world is powerless to intervene, but we must bear these unspeakable crimes in constant memory against the day of reckoning.’

After giving the paris of the evidence received from the United States, Viscount Bryce says that the following extracts were taken from his correspondent at Tiflis:

‘Toward the end of May Djevdet Bey, Military Governor, was expelled from Van. Djevdet fled southward and entered Sairt, with 8,000 soldiers, whom he called ‘Butcher battalions.’ He massacred most of the Christians of Sairt, the details of which nothing is known. On the best of authority, however, it is reported that he ordered his soldiers to burn in the public squares the Armenian Bishop, Eglise Vartaved, and the Chaldean Bishop, Addai Sher.

‘On June 25 the Turks surrounded the town of Bitlis, and cut its communications with neighboring Armenian villages. Then most of the able-bodied men were taken away from their women by domiciliary visits. During the following few days all the men under arrest were shot and buried in deep trenches dug by the victims themselves. The young women and children were distributed among the rabble. The others, the ‘useless lot,’ were driven to the south, and are believed to have been drowned in the Tigris.

‘Any attempts at resistance, however brave, were quelled by the regular troops. Many Armenians, after firing their last cartridge, took poison in order not to fall into the hands of the Turks.

‘It is in such a fashion that the Turks disposed of about 15,000 Armenians at Bitlis. At Mush early in July the authorities demanded arms from the Armenians and a large sum in ransom of notables of the town. The head men of the village were subjected to revolting tortures. Their fingernails and then their toenails were forcibly extracted; teeth were knocked out, and, in some cases noses were whittles down, the victims thus being killed under shocking lingering agony.

‘The female relatives of victims who came to the rescue were attacked in public before the eyes of their mutilated men. The shrieks and death cries of the victims filled the air, yet they did not move the Turkish beast.

‘In the town of Mush itself the Armenians, under the leadership of Gotoyan and others, entrenched themselves in churches and stone-built houses and fought for four days in self-defense, but Turkish artillery, manner by German officers, made short work of all the Armenian positives and every one of the Armenian leaders as well as their men were killed.

‘When they were dead and silence reigned over the ruins of the churches and houses the rest of the Mosel rabble descended upon the women and children and drove them out of the town and into large camps, which already had been prepared for the peasant women and children.

‘The ghastly scenes which followed may seem to be incredible, yet these reports have been confirmed beyond all doubt. The shortest means employed for disposing of the women and children in the various camps was by burning. Fire was set to the large wooden sheds in Alljan, Mograkm, Khaajogh and other Armenian villages and children were roasted to death.

‘Many women went insane and threw away their children. Some women knelt down and prayed amid the flames which were burning their bodies. Others shrieked for help, which came from nowhere and the executioners, who seemed to be unmoved by this unparalleled savagery, grasped infants by one leg and hurled them into the fire, calling out to the burning mothers, ‘Here are your lions!’

‘Turkish prisoners, who apparently witnessed some of these scenes, were horrified and maddened at remembering the sight. The odor of burning flesh, they say, permeated the air for many days.

‘In the hill country of Sasun the surviving warriors found themselves surrounded at close quarters by 30,000 Turks and Kurds. Then follow one of those desperate, heroic struggles for life which have always been the pride of the mountaineers. Men, women and children fought with knives, scythes and stones and anything they could handle. They rolled blocks of stone down the steep slopes, killing many of their enemies. In the frightful hand-to-hand combats women were seen thrusting their knives into the throats of Turks.

‘When every warrior had fallen several of the younger women, who were in danger of failing into the hands of the Turks, threw themselves from the rocks, many of them with infants in their arms.’