a girl and take her away, and, with the help of Allah the God of Love, convert her to the blessed creed.  No one was too young for these lessons....  A little abstemiousness would not hurt these pampered Christians, so when they set out on their marches they need not be provided with rations or water.  Perhaps some might die, but Talaat had no use for weaklings at his agricultural colonies.  Nor must there be any poking and prying on the part of those interfering American missionaries; and so Talaat Bey put all the agricultural colonies out of bounds for foreigners....

There was no hurry over these deportations, for the plea of military exigencies, which had caused the deportations in Armenia itself to be terminated by massacre with a rapidity almost inartistic, did not apply to Armenians so far from the seat of war.  Their picnics could be conducted quietly and pleasantly in the leisurely Oriental manner.  Even the men need not be murdered absolutely out of hand.  Strong young fellows might be stripped and tied down and then beaten to death by bastinadoing the feet till they burst, or by five hundred blows on the chest and stomach.  Their cries would mingle with the screams of their sisters in the embrace of Turkish soldiers.  And, talking of embraces, if a woman was desirable, she need not walk all the way to Deir-el-Zor, but by embracing Islamism be transferred to a harem.  But these were details that might be left to individual taste:  there were no precise instructions save that no Armenian men must be discoverable in the Ottoman Empire at all, and no women save those who had become Turkish women, or who were at work on the waterless and the malarial agricultural colonies.

Talaat Bey reviewed his finished scheme.  He thought it would do, and Enver Pasha agreed with him, and Jemal Bey (who soon after styled himself Jemal the Great), the Military Governor of Syria, and so responsible for the last stages of their pilgrimage, thought it would do very well indeed.  And instructions were sent out to every town in the Empire where there were Armenians, in accordance with the programme of Talaat Bey.

How Enver carried out his part of the programme in Armenia itself we have seen, and by the end of the year (1915) his work was done, and Armenia was Armenia no longer.  But operations, as I have said, were conducted in a more leisurely manner elsewhere, and the agony of that butchery protracted.  But Jemal got to work at once in the thickly populated district round Zeitun.  He had had no success in the campaign of the winter in the direction of the Suez Canal, and his troops were hungry for some sort of victory.  The Zeitunlis were hardy independent mountaineers, who were possessed of arms, and Jemal thought it more prudent not to dally with deportations, but conduct a regular campaign against them.  For two or three months they resisted, entrenching themselves in the hills, but they could not hold out against artillery and the modern apparatus of war, and the whole tribe was wiped out.  That done, Jemal became Jemal the Great by reason of his national services, and paid a visit to Germany.  On his return we shall hear of him again.