The Lions of Marash

To the innocent victims of the siege of Marash,
January-February 1920

FOREWORD

During World War I the Turkish government used a system of deportation to expel the Armenians from Anatolia, to drive them into tire Syrian Desert, and to exterminate as many of them as possible. News of the deportations reached Ambassador Henry Morgenthau in Constantinople almost as soon as they began by way of reports from American missionaries to their headquarters in that city. At the same time the German missionaries in Marash reported to their Berlin office on the passage of deportees from Zeitun. Ambassador Morgenthau forwarded all such information to Washington and early in September 1915 urged the secretary of state to see that an organization be created to raise funds and provide help to save the Armenians. He added the grim statement, ‘‘The destruction of the Armenian race is rapidly progressing.” 1

In reply to this appeal Dr. James L. Barton, foreign secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and my father, Cleveland H. Dodge, called together a group of men who organized what in the course of time became known as Near East Relief. At their first meeting they voted to raise $100,000. A month later the money had been raised and transferred to Ambassador Morgenthau. Since Mr. Dodge assumed the responsibility for payment of all overhead expenses of the organization, and the workers were to a large extent volunteers, whatever money was raised was used for relief work in the Near East.

Funds were needed for refugees in Anatolia but also in the Caucasus, Syria, Lebanon, Persia, and Greece. In the Urmia district of north-west Persia, Kurds—encouraged by the Turks—began to massacre the Christian Nestorians, who fled further into Persia. Dr. Harry Pratt Judson, president of the University of Chicago, led a timely expedition to Persia. Some three hundred thousand of the population of Lebanon died of starvation, despite our efforts to give relief, for Jamal Pasha withheld supplies of food in reprisal for the sympathy shown By the Lebanese Christians for the French as well as for the Arab revolt led by the grand Sharif Husain against the Turks.

The greatest need, however, was in the Caucasus. Conditions were so horrible that people in America thought that the accounts about them were exaggerated. When he went to the region as a member of a commission, Howard Heinz of Pittsburgh exclaimed, “Merciful God! It’s all true. Nobody has ever told the whole truth. Nobody could!’’ Col. William Haskell was sent to the Caucasus as a relief commissioner. Herbert Hoover, then head of the American Relief Commission, arranged to contribute goods equal in value to about half a million dollars per month, for nearly a year, while Near East Relief provided the practical help to administer the aid. In the Caucasus territory help was given to over three hundred thirty thousand people in three hundred thirty-eight villages. More than thirty thousand orphans were fed, clothed, and trained while they lived in reconditioned barracks.

Until the war came to an end it was difficult for Near East Relief to help the refugees in what was essentially hostile territory, for Turkey sided with the Central Powers. But when the war came to a close, Near East Relief was able to organize one of the most important programs of service ever undertaken. The board of trustees was enlarged. Charles V. Vickrey, general secretary from 1916 to 1929, with the help of Barclay Acheson and Harold C. Jaquith, raised large sums of money and recruited personnel. Nearly a thousand Americans served overseas. They displayed wonderful heroism, even martyrdom. Twenty-one of these workers and five missionaries died in the field from typhus, pneumonia, and other diseases.

The trustees planned the establishment of fifteen centers for relief in the Caucasus, Anatolia, Lebanon, and Greece. Each center was to have orphanages, medical facilities, and industrial work for the rehabilitation of the refugees. The blueprints of organization, therefore, included the personnel and equipment required for fifteen hospitals. Disease was so prevalent that among the thirty thousand orphans collected in the Caucasus not one was found in good health. In all, thirty doctors and fifty nurses were selected with the help of the American Red Cross. A number of mission hospitals in Anatolia and the American University Hospital in Beirut also offered their facilities. Equipment for the hospital at Kharput in central Turkey had to be transported five hundred miles on pack animals.

One of the great achievements of Near East Relief was its educational work. In each of its orphanages the children were given the  equivalent of a good primary school education. In orphanage shops  local carpenters, shoemakers, tinsmiths, tailors, dressmakers, bakers, weavers, and other tradesmen served as practical and devoted teachers. This activity not only provided clothing for the children but also taught them the trades and the manual skills needed later for self-support.

In Lebanon, some of the teachers thought that the most intelligent pupils should be trained to become literary leaders of the new Armenia. Many of their friends encouraged this idea, but with the help of the exceedingly wise Catholicos, religious leader of the Armenian community, and several of the leading businessmen, we insisted upon teaching the orphans Arabic and trades.

The children enjoyed the manual work. In the big carpentry shop at Amelias the boys erected a sign: Sweet Is the Bread of Our Sweat.

During the war Turkish commander Jamal Pasha gathered about eight hundred Armenian refugees, both boys and girls, and placed them in a French Catholic school building at Antoura. A military officer was in charge, but the orphanage was under the general supervision of Halidé Edib, the famous Turkish feminist. At the time of Field Marshall Lord Edmund Allenby's advance, when the Turks were escaping to the north, Halidé asked me to be responsible for the children. I arranged first for the American Red Cross and later for Near East Relief to take charge of the orphanage. Professor J. Stewart Crawford was made the administrator (one little boy put a hand in one of Professor Crawford’s hands, saying, “You are not our Mudir Bey, you’re our father!”).

The first Christmas celebration at Antoura was a moving experience. The children had been given Muslim names under the Turkish ad-ministration, but on this occasion the relief workers dealt out gifts marked with their proper Christian names as they stood around a huge Christmas tree. Imagine the feelings of these boys and girls when they realized that they had been saved from the war and were being cared for by loving Christian teachers.

Dr. Kerr’s book explains how the Armenians suffered when the French failed to retain their hold on Marash and other places which they had occupied, and how the Kemalists took steps to expel the Armenians from their newly formed republic. Near East Relief workers in the cities of Cilicia inquired whether the orphans would be sent to Lebanon. One day I asked the viscount Robert Caix de Sainte Aymour, secretary to the high commissioner for Syria and Lebanon, for permission to bring twelve hundred orphans to Lebanon. He laughed and said, “Do you know what the man who just left my office asked? He wanted permission to bring twenty-five hundred adults from Cilicia to Lebanon!”

The orphans were brought southward in caravans with some riding on pack animals, and many on foot. Once they reached the Baghdad Railway they were packed into boxcars and brought to Beirut, sometimes on very short notice. At the boys’ orphanage in Antelias I informed the diminutive, white-haired Armenian in charge of reception that several hundred boys were due to arrive there the next morning. “Let ’em come!” he replied. After the children were unloaded from the freight train, tired and dirty from their long journey by caravan and boxcar, they were taken to the orphanage on the seaside at Antelias, where they gave up their clothing to be cleaned and fumigated. Then they were led naked into the Mediterranean. As Orientals have a prejudice against nakedness, and none of the children bad even seen the ocean before, it was comical but sometimes pitiful to watch them. Needless to say, they were thirsty after traveling overnight in the train, so that the first thing they did was to drink the water. They were amazed when they found it to be salty. After their clothes had been cleaned and returned to them, the children were distributed among our big orphanages at Ghazir and along the coast between Sidon and Jbail.

As the orphans reached the age of sixteen they left the institution to live outside and to find employment. Near East Relief organized workers’ homes, night schools, clubs, and other means of helping the children to adapt themselves to the practical issues of life. Some were adopted by local families.

It became obvious that Near East Relief could not become a permanent organization to care for orphans. While the children were growing up, the adult refugees were finding work and improving the places in which they lived. Accordingly, in 1925, Dr. Thomas Jesse Jones was appointed to conduct a survey and to recommend whether the temporary relief should be entirely closed down or else changed into a different form of work.

A conference was held at Robert College in Istanbul during the spring of 1927 to discuss the findings of his survey. As a result of this conference, Near East Relief was brought to an end, and in 1930 the Near East Foundation was established. Because the orphans had matured enough to carry on without further help, and the refugees had for the most part been able to find work, the transition was not too difficult to accomplish.

Today most of the eight thousand children once cared for in the orphanages still live in Lebanon, have families of their own, and are more prosperous than one would expect.
Perhaps the most fitting description of the impact of American Near East Relief has been given by President Calvin

Coolidge:
Not only has life been saved, but economic, social, intellectual and moral forces have been released. New methods in child welfare, in public health and practical education have been introduced. A new sense of the value of the child, a new conception of religion in action and a new hope for a better social order have been aroused. All this has brought enduring results, a promise of a brighter future to replace the despair of years of fear and hopelessness. The work of the Committee has demonstrated practical Christianity without sectarianism and without ecclesiastical form, recognizing the rights of each and all to their ancestral faith, while expressing religion in terms of sacrifice and service that others might live and be benefited. Its creed was the Golden Rule and its ritual the devotion of life and treasure to the healing of wounds caused by war.2

Princeton, New Jersey / Bayard Dodge
December 1971
2. Ibid., pp. vii-x.