Yet all the time, as the wounded Turks were sent from the Gallipoli front back to Konia, the Armenian nurses in the hospital there were healing them.  But the Turkish Government gave its orders.  Vile bands of Turkish soldiers rushed down on the different cities and villages of the Armenians.[64] One sunny morning a troop of Turkish soldiers came dashing into a quiet little Armenian town among the hills.  An order was given.  The Turks smashed in the doors of the houses.  A father stood up before his family; a bayonet was driven through him and soldiers dashed over his dead body; they looted the house; they smashed up his home; others seized the mother and the daughters—­the mother had a baby in her arms; the baby was flung on the ground and then picked up dead on the point of a bayonet; and, though the mother and daughters were not bayoneted then, it would have been better to die at once than to suffer the unspeakable horrors that came to them.

And that happened in hundreds of villages and cities to hundred of thousands of Armenians, while hundreds of thousands more scattered down the mountain passes in flight towards Konia.

The Orphan Boys and Girls

As Miss Cushman and her Armenian nurses looked out through the windows of the hospital, their hearts were sad as they saw some of these Armenian refugees trailing along the road like walking skeletons.  What was to happen to them?  It was very dangerous for anyone to show that they were friends with the Armenians, but the white matron was as brave as she was kind; so she went out to do what she could to help them.

One day she saw a little boy so thin that the bones seemed almost to be coming through his skin.  He was very dirty; his hair was all matted together; and there were bugs and fleas in his clothes and in his hair.  The hospital was so full that not another could be taken in.  But the boy would certainly die if he were not looked after properly.  His father and his mother had both been slain by the Turks; he did not know where his brothers were.  He was an orphan alone in all the world.

Miss Cushman knew Armenian people in Konia, and she went to one of these homes and told them about the poor boy and arranged to pay them some money for the cost of his food.  So she made a new home for him.  The next day she found another boy, and then a girl, and so she went on and on, discovering little orphan Armenian boys and girls who had nobody to care for them, and finding them homes—­until she had over six hundred orphans being cared for.  It is certain that nearly all of them would have died if she had not looked after them.