who are striving for freedom, and let them understand that freedom is not to be achieved but by the shedding of blood, and that words are the stock-in-trade of the weak alone.
I observed that the crosses had been removed from the lofty steeples of the churches, which are used as storehouses and markets for the keeping and sale of the effects of the dead.
Methods of Slaughter.—These were of various kinds. An officer told me that in the Vilayet of Bitlis the authorities collected the Armenians in barns full of straw (or chaff), piling up straw in front of the door and setting it on fire, so that the Armenians inside perished in the smoke. He said that sometimes hundreds were put together in one barn. Other modes of killing were also employed (at Bitlis). He told me, to my deep sorrow, how he had seen a girl hold her lover in her embrace, and so enter the barn to meet her death without a tremor.
At Moush, a part were killed in straw-barns, but the greater number by shooting or stabbing with knives, the Government hiring butchers, who received a Turkish pound each day as wages. A doctor, named Azîz Bey, told me that when he was at Marzifûn, in the Vilayet of Sivas, he heard that a caravan of Armenians was being sent to execution. He went to the Kaimakâm and said to him: “You know I am a doctor, and there is no difference between doctors and butchers, as doctors are mostly occupied in cutting up mankind. And as the duties of a Kaimakâm at this time are also like our own—cutting up human bodies—I beg you to let me see
