’I felt on Sunday as if I ought to get my own burial clothes ready, so as to make as little trouble as possible when my time comes, for in these days we all go about our work knowing that any one of us may be the next to go down.  And yet I think our friends would be surprised to see how cheerful we have kept, and how many occasions we find for laughing:  for ludicrous things do happen.  Then, too, after dwelling so intimately with Death for three months, he doesn’t seem to have so unfriendly an aspect, and the “Other Side” seems near, and our Pilot close beside us....  I find the Rock on which I can anchor in peace are the words of Christ Himself:  “Where I am, there ye may be also.” ...  That is enough, to be where He is....’

Then comes a break of two months, during which the writer was down with typhoid.  She resumes again in June, finding that death has made many changes, and gets back to work again at once.  By that time the Russians had entered Urmia, a thanksgiving service was held, the refugees dispersed, and the American Mission went quietly on with its normal work.

Now I have taken this one instance of the work of Americans at Urmia to show in some detail the character of the work that they were doing, and the Christian and humanising influence of it.  But all over Armenia and Anatolia were similar settlements, and, as already mentioned, at the time of the massacres there were established there over a hundred of their churches and over four hundred schools, and from these extracts which concern only one not very large centre, it may be gathered what leaven of civilising influence the sum of their energies must have implied.  That lamp shone steady and clear, a ‘kindly light’ in the darkness of Turkish misrule, and in the havoc of the massacres a beacon of hope, not always reached by those hapless refugees.  Indeed it seems to have been only on the frontier that the missions were able to save those foredoomed hordes of fleeing Christians; in Armenia and in Anatolia generally the massacres and ‘deportations’ were complete, and by the end of 1915 all American missions were closed, for there were none to tend and care for.  Even if the massacres had not occurred, the entry of America into the war would have resulted in a similar cessation of their work, and most probably in a massacre of the American missioners themselves.  Their withdrawal, of course, was hailed with a peacock scream of pride by that enlightened body under Talaat and Enver, called the New Turkish party of Progress, for their presence was a bar to the Turkish notions of civilisation, in that their influence made for humanity, and health and education.  Now ’the humiliating and dangerous situation’ (to quote from the columns of Hilal) was put an end to, and Turkish progress could make headway again.