"Bey, where have all these human bones along this road come from?" Balkian asked the captain disingenuously.
"These are the bones of Armenians who were killed in August and September. The order had come from Constantinople. Even though the minister of the interior [i.e., Talat] had huge ditches dug for the corpses, the winter floods washed the dirt away, and now the bones are everywhere, as you see", Captain Shukri replied.
"Upon whose orders were the massacres of the Armenians committed?" Balakian probed.
"The orders came from the Ittihad [i.e. Unionist] Central Committee and the Interior Ministry in Constantinople", Captain Shukri explained. "This order was carried out most severely by Kemal . . . vice-governor of Yozgat. When Kemal, a native of Van, heard that the Armenians had massacred all his family members at the time of the Van revolt, he sought revenge and massacred the women and children, together with the men."
Balakian's questions did not upset the captain. He seemed to enjoy filling the long hours in conversation with the priest, inured to the evil he recounted: of the thousands of men hacked to death, of 6,400 Armenian women systematically robbed of their possessions and murdered along with their children, actions he consistently referred to as "cleansing"(paklamak in Turkish).
The mass-murdering Ottoman officer even seemed to develop an affection for the Armenian priest, offering to protect him from all harm if only he would convert to Islam.
Through conversations with Turkish officers, Balakian learned every aspect of the Armenian tragedy from the government's perspective. In his exchanges with survivors encountered along the way, the priest also deepened his knowledge of the Armenian experience of the genocide. He wove both perspectives together in his remarkable memoirs, first published in Armenian in 1922, thereby discharging his duty as a witness to what Balakian dubbed the "Armenian Golgotha".
Surviving the genocide was easier said than done. By preserving cordial relations with his captors and, in his own words, putting his trust in God, Balakian lived one day at a time, always at risk of sudden death. During the length of their forced march, the priest and his fellows confronted the magnitude of the horror that had befallen the Ottoman Armenian community: the bodies of the dead, the pleas of starving survivors, the shame of those who had converted to Islam to save their lives. He recorded the details in his diary as the caravan made its way across Anatolia to Cilicia towards the Syrian Desert. The accounts of other survivors of the Armenian genocide confirmed much of what he wrote.
Fear of violent death that might come at any moment without warning compounded the daily experience of brutality, exhaustion, and deprivation. Many Armenians chose to take their own lives rather than face the cruelty of strangers. Even Grigoria Balakian, who had vowed to survive, was driven to contemplate suicide. When accosted by an armed gang near the Halys River, Balakian and his comrades agreed to drive into the torrential waters in the event of "inescapable disaster", as many had done before them.
"Surely this deep grave of tens of thousands of Armenians would not refuse to take us too into its flowing turbid currents . . . and save us from harrowing and cruel deaths, at the hands of these Turkish criminals", he recalled. Only Balakian's presence of mind in negotiating the caravan's way past the gang spared them all on that occasion.
Manuel Kerkyasharian, who called himself M.K., was only a nine-year-old boy when he watched his mother dive from a bridge into the turbulent waters of the Euphrates. Natives of Adana, M.K.'s family had been deported to the Mesopotamian settlement of Ras al-Ayn (in modern Syria). An only child, M.K. saw his family robbed by armed gangs and beaten by the gendarmes sent to escort them. His mother's feet swelled painfully from the extensive marching, but she struggled to keep up with the caravan, knowing the fate of those who fell behind.
One night, when she knew she could walk no further, M.K.'s mother made a terrible request of her husband: "Lead me to the river's edge. I am going to throw myself into the water. If I stay, the Arabs will kill me with torture." Her husband refused, but a neighbour understood her fears and carried M.K.'s mother on his back to the banks of the swollen Euphrates. Her young son and a priest followed them to the river, but M.K. averted his eyes when she threw herself into the torrent. When he turned back, he saw his mother briefly before the current carried her away.
Within two days of his mother's death, M.K.'s father died in his sleep. The young boy was now an orphan with no one to care for him. He watched as soldiers killed a number of women and children who, like him, had been left behind by the caravan. He was robbed of his remaining clothes down to his underpants and abandoned by the roadside alone -- hungry, thirsty, and terrified.
The Armenian priest Grigoris Balakian encountered many such orphans along the way. At Islahiye, near where M.K. was orphaned, he encountered an eight-year-old boy begging with his eleven-year-old sister, both nearly naked and dying from hunger. The elder sister explained "in a schoolgirl's proper Armenian" how all the other members of their family of fourteen had died, leaving the  children to fend for themselves. "How I wish we hadn't survived". she sobbed.
Buffered by forces beyond his control, young Manuel Kerkyasharian did survive. He found himself among Arabs and Kurds, people whose languages he did not speak and whose actions he did not understand. Some gave him food and clothing; others stoned and robbed him. He witnessed acts of terrible brutality and crossed plains covered with Armenian corpses. He was rescued by four Kurdish women who found him wandering on the open road and took him back to their village as a domestic servant. He spent the remainder of the war years moving among the Kurdish villages on the Turkish-Syrian frontier, living off the kindness -- and fleeing the cruelty -- of strangers.
As he moved between the villages of south-eastern Anatolia, M.K. encountered a number of Armenian children and young women who, like him, had taken refuge among the Kurds. Many had been collected from the death marches and taken to work in the homes and farms of the Kurdish villagers. M.K. met several young Armenian women who had married into the families of their Kurdish protectors....

From: The Fall of the Ottomans -- The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan