Yet all the time, as the wounded Turks were sent from the Gallipoli
front back to Konia, the Armenian nurses in the hospital there were
healing them. But the Turkish Government gave its orders. Vile bands
of Turkish soldiers rushed down on the different cities and villages
of the Armenians.[64] One sunny morning a troop of Turkish soldiers
came dashing into a quiet little Armenian town among the hills. An
order was given. The Turks smashed in the doors of the houses. A
father stood up before his family; a bayonet was driven through him
and soldiers dashed over his dead body; they looted the house; they
smashed up his home; others seized the mother and the daughters--the
mother had a baby in her arms; the baby was flung on the ground and
then picked up dead on the point of a bayonet; and, though the mother
and daughters were not bayoneted then, it would have been better to
die at once than to suffer the unspeakable horrors that came to them.

And that happened in hundreds of villages and cities to hundred of
thousands of Armenians, while hundreds of thousands more scattered
down the mountain passes in flight towards Konia.

_The Orphan Boys and Girls_

As Miss Cushman and her Armenian nurses looked out through the windows
of the hospital, their hearts were sad as they saw some of these
Armenian refugees trailing along the road like walking skeletons. What
was to happen to them? It was very dangerous for anyone to show that
they were friends with the Armenians, but the white matron was as
brave as she was kind; so she went out to do what she could to help
them.

One day she saw a little boy so thin that the bones seemed almost to
be coming through his skin. He was very dirty; his hair was all matted
together; and there were bugs and fleas in his clothes and in his
hair. The hospital was so full that not another could be taken in. But
the boy would certainly die if he were not looked after properly. His
father and his mother had both been slain by the Turks; he did not
know where his brothers were. He was an orphan alone in all the world.

Miss Cushman knew Armenian people in Konia, and she went to one of
these homes and told them about the poor boy and arranged to pay them
some money for the cost of his food. So she made a new home for him.
The next day she found another boy, and then a girl, and so she went
on and on, discovering little orphan Armenian boys and girls who had
nobody to care for them, and finding th