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| Double Vision (1999) |
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Somewhere, ahead of the refugees, on a lower rutted road, the French soldiers and the American missionaries were not much better off. Even Dr. Elliott was walking, though she, like all the Americans, had been given permission to ride on wagons with the Army baggage train. Mabel Elliott had been Most of her patients were women. In Marash, after the genocide, there were always more women than men. As a massacre came to each community, the men were marched to the outskirts of their cities and shot in masses. Soldiers returned for the women, who were marched with the children to the distant desert, most to be raped, kidnapped, or killed. In the end more children survived. Marash became "The City of Orphans." The battle for Marash had brought out her anger. When she saw the mounting piles of butchered Armenian bodies and was told to prepare for the French retreat, she wrote in her diary: "They had relied on us, on the great, powerful Allies. They had come back to Marash, to their wrecked homes and lived under our protection..." Once more, she wrote bitterly, they faced Turkish rapes and death. "I think that all the rest of my days I shall suddenly hear from time to time that sentence quietly said...'What shall we do now, doctor?' " Later, she found that one of her favorite patients, a young tubercular woman too weak to escape over the mountains, took off her clothes and sat by an open window, to freeze quietly to death in the night rather than wait for the Turks to enter the hospital for the sick and wounded left behind. In the blizzard, the doctor dared not ride any longer. She walked on the trail to stay alive by moving. "In time, I, too, was a blind machine...I thought of nothing, cared for nothing, simply struggled to keep my balance...The temptation of it! Just to lie down and let the snow cover us." She saw Armenian mothers carrying small children on their backs. Typically the child's arms crossed over the mother's shoulder, the struggling mother clutching both hands of the child onto her own breast. "I do not know how many hours we had been walking when I found the first dead child on its mother's back. I walked beside her, examining it; she trudged on, bent under the weight...The child was certainly dead, and she did not know it...I spoke to her, touched her, finally shook her arm violently to arouse her. When she looked up, I pointed to the child and said, 'Finished.' The mother...let go the child's hands. The body fell...There were perhaps fifty more after that, always the same." FROM the chapter "The Exodus," from the book Double Vision: Reflections on My Heritage, Life, and Profession by Ben H. Bagdikian. Copyright © 1999 by Ben H. Bagdikian. Reprint courtesy of Beacon Press, Boston. Writer: Ben H. Bagdikian Writer's Country: United States Original Language: English Genre: Memoirs Event: Armenian Genocide BIO:Ben Bagdikian is one of the most respected figures in American journalism. He has been a professional newsman since 1941. Ke graduated from Clar |
medical director of the hospital, and the old Marash photographs show a sturdy Boston face with steady gaze, hair pulled back in a bun, rimless glasses, firm jaw and mouth, classical WASP nose. 
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