No accurate estimate of the number slain in the first massacre could be made. Forty villages were totally destroyed and the loss of life from ten to fifteen thousand. Efforts were made to conceal the real extent of the carnage, but the "blood-bath of Sassoun" has passed into history and cannot be forgotten.
At Bitlis there was a Kurdish raid on Armenian cattle, resulting in a fight in which two Kurds were killed.
The friends of the Kurds took the corpses to Moush and declared that the Armenians had overrun the land and were killing and plundering right and left. This furnished a pretext for a massing of the troops.
On the admissions of Turkish soldiers, some of whom tearfully protested that they merely obeyed orders, six thousand people were killed. No compassion was shown to age or sex. In one place three or four hundred women, after having been forced repeatedly to submit to the soldiery, were hacked to pieces with swords and bayonets. In another place two hundred women begged at the commander's feet for mercy. The commander, after ordering that they be outraged, had them all despatched with the sword. Similar scenes were enacted in other places.
In one case sixty young brides and maidens were driven into a church, and after being violated were butchered until their blood flowed from the doors.
A large company, headed by a priest, knelt near the church begging for compassion, averring that they had nothing to do with the culprits who killed the Kurds. It was in vain; all were killed.
Several attractive women were told that they might live if they would recant their faith. They replied: "Why should we deny Christ? We have no more reason to do so than had these," pointing to the mangled bodies of their husbands and brothers, "Kill us, too." This was done.
A priest was taken to the roof of his church and hacked to pieces; young men were placed among wood saturated with kerosene and set on fire. After the massacre, and when the terrified survivors had fled, there was a general looting by the Hamidieh Kurds. They stripped the houses bare, then piled the dead into them and fired the whole, intending as far as possible to cover up the evidences of their dreadful crime.
The rivulets were choked with corpses; the streams ran red with human blood, the mountain gorges and rocky caves were crowded with the dead and dying; among the black ruins of once prosperous villages lay half-burned infants on their mothers' mangled bodies: pits were dug at night by the wretches destined to fill them; many of whom were flung in while but slightly wounded, and underneath a mountain of clammy corpses struggled vainly with death and with the dead who shut them out of life and light forever.