Four battalions of Turkish troops arrived from Constantinople, and an order was given that all Armenians must leave the town within three days, after ‘registering themselves’ at the Government office.  The women and children were to remain, but their money and their property would be confiscated.  Within two hours after that, owing, I suppose, to fresh orders from Constantinople, the guns opened fire on the crowds in the streets flocking to the registry offices, and after that systematic house-to-house murder began.  Prominent Armenians were tortured to death, houses containing women and children were set on fire, a body of men collected together was thrown into the river, girls were outraged and slaughtered.  For two days the massacre continued, and by the end of the second day the Armenian question was solved as regards Mush.

In the surrounding villages the same Prussian thoroughness was observed, and out of all the inhabitants of the plain 5000 only seemed to have survived, who fled to Sasun (there to be subsequently massacred in 1916), while a few from outlying villages escaped to the Russian troops.  In certain villages the girls and young women were given to the Kurd soldiery, who raped them publicly in the presence of their families, not sparing girls of eight and ten years of age, who then, bleeding and violated, were shot in company with the old women, for whom the Kurds (inspired by Allah, the God of Love) had no use.  Elsewhere, as the story of a deported woman from Kheiban tells us, the women guarded by Kurdish troops were driven out of their villages, leaving behind the corpses of the men and of old women who could not walk, and for days were marched along the roads, nearly naked, under the fierce heat of the July sun.  Once every other day they were given bread, but all did not get it, and many fell exhausted by the wayside, and were either whipped to their feet again or allowed to lie down and die.  As they passed through villages Kurds would come out and rape a girl or two, and when they halted at night their guards would come among them....  Some few escaped; the rest, in dwindling company, went on through days of blinding sun and nights of shame till at last there were only a few remaining.  It was not worth while going farther, for the work of Enver Pasha was nearly done, and the rest were pushed into the river.  One alone survived, who could swim, and she, with her two-year-old baby on her back, got across the stream and made her way to a village where were a party of Armenians who had escaped massacre.  She arrived there at midnight, and at first they thought she was a ghost.  To them she told her story of the outraged and ever-dwindling caravan of helpless women and girls driven onwards all day beneath the smiting arrows of the sun, and encamped by the wayside, where they halted with their barbarous guards and their lusts for a terror by night.  Of them none but this one was left, who had carried her baby with her every step of that infernal pilgrimage.  Two days afterwards he died from want of nourishment, and before the week was out the mother fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, and was killed.