Massacre Tale Worse Than any Told Says Bryce

[Republican A. P. Leased Wire ]

LONDON, Nov, 26.- Viscount Bryce made public tonight the details of further Armenian massacres which is a letter accompanying them, he says “surpass in horror, if that were possible. What has already been published.”

“I feel,’ his letter continues, ” that such crimes ought to be exposed to the utmost and that the charity or other nations will, more than ever be drawn to the unhappy refugees when it is known that 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 fiendish 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 all Armenian gentleman 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 Sania,” Viscount Bryce says, “seem to have been even more terrible than were those of the peaceful town folk described in part one 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 phase of event 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 parts of the evidence received from the United States. Viscount Bryce says that the following extracts were taken from his correspondent at Tiflies.

Toward the end of May Djevdet Bey the military governor was expelled from Van. Djevdet fled southward and entered Sairt with some 8,000 soldiers whom he called “bucher 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 Vartaveg and the Chaldean bishop Addai Sher.

On June 25 the Turks surrounded the town of Bitlis and cur 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 town and buried in deep trenches dug by the victims themselves. The young women and children were distributed among and children were distributed among the rabble. The remainder 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 either took poison by whole families or killed themselves in order not to fall into 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 whittled down. The victims thus wait for death under shocking lingering agony.

“The female relatives of victims who came to the rescue were assaulted in public before the very 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 Gatoyan  and others entrenched themselves in churches and stone houses and fought for four days in self-defense. But Turkish artillery, manned by German officers made short work of all the Armenian positions and everyone of the Armenian leaders, as well as their men were killed in fighting.

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