The convoy numbered, when it left Baiburt, some 15,000 persons, and it reached Erzinjan in safety.  There the massacres had already taken place, and the women and children had been deported, for they found no Armenians there.  But the convoy had not yet arrived at its goal, and it started out again moving south by east till it came to Kamakh.  There bands of Kurds descended on them, and in the space of seven days every male above fifteen years of age, including an aged priest of ninety, was killed.  Thereafter a pilgrimage of women, as from Kheiban, moved southwards across plain and mountain, and every day its numbers were diminished, for the youthful and the good-looking were carried off by brigands.  At night they were halted outside villages, and the gendarmes and villagers took what they chose.  Many died from hunger and heat-stroke:  others were left by the wayside.  When they came to the banks of the river Kara-Su there was a debauch of horror.  Women and girls and little children were raped and mutilated, and the children who still survived were thrown into the river.  Those who could swim were shot.  Thereafter the movements of this caravan are hard to trace.  Probably there was then but little left of it.  But others followed on the same route ’through fields and hillsides dotted with swollen and blackened corpses that filled and fouled the air with their stench.’  Some of them reached Mosul, some reached Aleppo, another collecting station, where, by the mouth of other witnesses, we shall hear of them again.

Corroborative and additional evidence is given by the Danish Red Cross nurses who, with a noble disregard of their own safety, accompanied one of these caravans from Erzerum to Erzinjan.  They speak of the massacres at Kamakh, of the killing by the river, and of a battue through the cornfields, where the wheat was high, into which some Armenians had escaped.  At one time these Danish Sisters were in the charge of a gendarme who had superintended a massacre of 3000 women and children driven from their homes into the country, rounded up and killed.  He told the Sisters that this was the best method of getting rid of them, for they should be made to suffer first, and besides it would be inconvenient for Moslems to live in a village with so many corpses about.  At another place they came to a shambles, where Armenian soldiers, deprived of their arms, and sent to make roads, had been slaughtered:  at another there were three gangs of labourers, one Moslem, one Greek, and one Armenian.  These latter were guarded.  Presently, as they proceeded along their road, they looked round and saw that the Armenian gang was being formed up by itself, a little off the highroad....