Reaching Van, we were the guests of the hospital of the Zuyuz Gardoff. This is one of the nationwide volunteer organizations akin to our Red Cross, which has, in a measure, supplied the deficiencies of the old Government in caring for the wounded soldiers, providing the little comforts and conveniences which make soldier-life endurable. The doctors and nurses were hospitality itself, and on the night before we left arranged for an Armenian dinner in our honor as American Commissioners. There were speeches in English, Armenian, Turkish, Russian, and Esperanto. The speech in Esperanto was delivered by a Russian soldier who immediately acted as his own interpreter as no other person in the audience could understand Esperanto, thus illustrating the curious kinks of the Russian mind.

The city of Van, which is situated on a high plateau fifty-two hundred feet above sea-level, stands out pre-eminently in the record of the present Armenian massacres. Here a thousand volunteer Armenian militiamen held off ten thousand Turkish troops for a period of twenty-eight days, protecting the city and the Armenian residents from massacre until the arrival of the rescuing Russian Army. It was the only place in which the Armenians had made a determined resistance against the inhuman Turks. But to a certain extent their resistance was in vain, for five months later the Russians, without proper reason, unexpectedly retreated and the populace found it necessary to follow, taking with them only what they could conveniently carry or transport in their limited number of carts and wagons. Since the Russians upon their arrival had not spared the Turkish property in the city of Van, one could readily imagine what the Mohammedans did to the Christian possessions upon the recapture of the city. The premises of the American Mission, comprising schools, homes, a hospital and an orphanage, were a maze of wrecked buildings. The church alone stood practically intact and was being used by the Russian soldiers as their own. Mosques everywhere had been desecrated. Wealthy Pasha homes and palaces were only blank walls of brick. A city of fifty thousand inhabitants, wealthy, beautiful, and prosperous, was in ruins.

In several places we visited the Turkish front and found the soldiers storing wood and preparing for the bitter cold of winter. For the most part they lived in dugouts made of dirt, stone, and brush. Some of these were almost totally underground and had the double advantage of warmth in winter and coolness in summer. The Caucasus Army has employed the Mongolian huts or tents extensively, bringing them from Turkestan. A round frame base of wood with conical top is covered with heavy decorated felt instead of canvas. General Wachnadze, of the Sixth Caucasian Regiment, a Georgian prince, was especially courteous to us. With his staff he took us to the front so that we could clearly see the Turkish soldiers across the line. We also enjoyed a holiday excursion as his guests, going to the top of Mount Nimrod, an extinct volcano containing the largest volcanic lake in the world, its diameter being about three miles.

The soldiers along this front were holding on tenaciously, not because of the Turkish attacks, for the Turks were apparently in a very bad way for want of food, judging from the great numbers of deserters who came over daily, but because of the scarcity of food supplies and the fear that it would be necessary to fall back on their lines of communication. In the past many soldiers had been caught in a cul de sac along this front and had died of starvation, and we found that most regiments were suffering from limited rations. The morale of this army was probably better than that of any other in Russia, but it was distinctly undermined by the lack of transportation and the consequent food shortage. This front was, on an average, at least a week's journey from the nearest rail-head. Nature and the pacific attitude of the Russian troops, not Turkish resistance, blocked the way to a successful offensive.

When we asked the Russians at the front why they did not shoot, they said, "What's the use? If we fire, the Turks simply fire back; someone is likely to be hurt and nothing is gained." Class distinction between officers and men had broken down. We noted that when private soldiers came in they merely joined the group in free, democratic conversation. The soldiers' committees passed on any action and no important movement was possible without their consent.

Warfare on this front was not the modern trench warfare of France, but the old-fashioned kind, in which details and divisions of troops held passes and high roads and strategic points. There were trenches, of course, but the equipment and housing arrangement of the soldiers were all of a mobile nature, so that they might be moved at any time from one position to another.

I have spoken of the Turkish deserters. One particularly pathetic deserter from the Turkish army was a Greek from Smyrna. He said that during the first two years of the war he had twice paid the cost of exemption from the Turkish army, but that in spite of his payments, they had unjustly forced him into the service.

In our days of journeying from the Turkish front, even better opportunities than we had heretofore experienced were afforded us for measuring the devastation of this region. Over a war-zone six hundred miles long from Trebizond, Turkey, to Ramadan, Persia, and from one hundred to three hundred miles wide, the advancing and retreating armies — Christian and Moslem — had beaten back and forth, laying waste practically every village, town, and city. Four times we crossed, transversely and longitudinally, major portions of this area, and can report thousands of square miles of the oldest known portions of the world's surface denuded of every inhabitant except those engaged in military service. We have seen literally hundreds of towns destroyed and lifeless. It was worse than Belgium or France, for the people had all been killed or driven absolutely away. Over this whole district farms were lying fallow during a period of unprecedented world famine. No foodstuffs were being raised in this most fertile region, nor any cattle. The surviving inhabitants were crowded into seemingly safe territory outside the war devastated zone and had become the uninvited and unwelcome guests of the native peoples.

Part of this trip was made in Red Cross carts and army wagons. The Red Cross carts nominally have springs, but it would be hard to conceive of anything more uncomfortable. Even sitting on the seat, we found the jarring of these two-wheeled vehicles a severe trial. What must it have been for the wounded men who were forced to endure it for days, lying flat in the body of the cart! In fact, ordinary army wagons or fergons without any springs, which we later traveled and slept in, did not seem much worse. We found Mongolian coolies working on the railroads that were being built to the front, just as thousands of them are working behind the British and French lines in France — on the railroads and in the fields. The Russians had built hundreds of miles of auto road which were nearly completed, but they had finished no part of it so that it could be used. Part of this high-road skirted the banks of the famous Euphrates, which here runs west by south before making a semi-circle into the Mesopotamian plain.