the murder of the whole male population, after suitable tortures, supposing the executioners had a taste for the sport, and to them was given the right of general plunder.  Then, as soon as the number and capacity of the vacant houses were telegraphed to Constantinople, occupiers from the discontented townsfolk and natives of Thrace were assigned to them.  Sometimes there would be a big school building to give away as well, but that was not always so, for it might be more convenient to assemble Armenians there for purposes of registration or so forth, and then, if it happened to catch fire, why Enver would understand that such accidents would occur.  Among other careful and well-thought-out instructions came the order that, when possible, the murders should not take place in the town, but outside it, for clean Allah-fearing Moslems would not like to live in habitations defiled by Christian corpses.  But, above all, there must be thoroughness; not a man must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman who must not drag her outraged body, so long as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to, or rather towards those ‘agricultural colonies,’ as Talaat Bey, in a flash of whimsical Prussian humour, called them.  One was advantageously situated in the middle of the Anatolian desert at the village of Sultanieh.  There, for miles round, stretched the rocks and sands of a waterless wilderness, but no doubt the women and children of this very industrious race would manage to make it wave with cornfields.  Another agricultural colony, by way of contrast, should be established a couple of days’ journey south of Aleppo, where the river loses itself in pestilential and malarious swamps.  Arabs could not live there, but who knew whether those hardy Armenians (the women and children, of them at least who had proved themselves robust enough to reach the place) would not flourish there out of harm’s way?  After the swamps one came to the Arabian desert, and there, a hundred miles south-east, was a place called Deir-el-Zor; wandering Arab tribes sometimes passed through it, but, arrived there, the Armenians should wander no more.  In those arid sands and waterless furnaces of barren rock there was room for all and to spare.  Sultanieh, the swamps, and Deir-el-Zor:  these were the chief of Talaat Bey’s agricultural colonies.

There must be collecting stations for these tragic colonists, centres to which they must be herded in from surrounding districts:  one at Osmanieh, let us say, one at Aleppo, one at Ras-el-Ain, one at Damascus.  And since it would be a pity to let so many flowers of girlhood waste their sweetness on the desert air of Deir-el-Zor, slave markets must be established at these collecting stations.  There would be plenty of girls, and prices would be low, but the reverend ministers of Allah the God of Love, the Ulemas, the Padis and the Muftis, should be accorded a preferential tariff.  Indeed they should pay nothing at all; they should just choose