Gun-Running!
189
Today there arc 3,250,000 of us—indestructible as God's Law.
My friend, if anybody survives atomic warfare it will be the
Armenian."
We burst out in laughter.
"They speak of us as an Eastern people, but our culture is
a hybrid of West and the residue of civilizations—East and
West—that crisscrossed our country. Our religion and language are Western. Our feelings for democracy are Western.
Others boast of their martyrs: a thousand and one publicized
saints, with more manufactured every year. How about the
tens of thousands of Armenians who chose death instead of
conversion to Islam? They perished to keep Christ's holy
flame burning. These are the real martyrs—the unsung saints,
known but to God, unknown to your Western journals. Christianity with us has been no luxury. It was as hard to cling to as
life itself, but as long as we kept Him, He kept us."
The words seemed to pour out of the Armenian.
"See those mounds, those hills?" He pointed with a
gnarled hand. "If they could speak they would call out their
names: Boghos, Avedis, Antranik, Hagop, Stepan, Sumpad!
Armenians are buried everywhere on this desert around us.
They fought with the Allies—with the English and the
French in World War I to help liberate the Arabs from the
Turks. Where did it get us, my friend? Here, there, under
those mounds—death. We marched into Jerusalem with Allenby.2 The dead piled on the dead. We have fertilized the
ground for the ambitions of this big power or that. You remember, do you not, how the English and the French deserted us in Turkey in 1921 and 1922, and looked the other
2
Marshal Allenby's assault on Beersheba in October 1917 enabled him
to liberate the rest of Palestine from the Turks and capture Jerusalem two
months later. About 75,000 members of the Armenian Legion of Volunteers
died on the Arab and European fronts, fighting with the Allies.
A former United States consul-general, George Horton, wrote of these
and other experiences in The Blight of Asia, An Account of the Systematic
Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill; 1926).