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By the 16th he was at Kuprikeui where the road crosses the Araxes, and in a two days' battle he broke the Turkish army, driving its remnants south towards Mush and clearing the way to Erzerum.
It is difficult to measure with any accuracy the political results of the success of the Russians at Erzerum, for the political results far outweighed the military. In a general way it can be said that it had little or no effect upon the Balkans, and upon Mohammedan opinion throughout the East, merely serving to offset in a small measure the effects of the allied withdrawal from the Dardanelles.
Northward from Mush, and Bitlis lies the province of Erzerum, with the town of the same name, that contained in the autumn of 1914 some 20,000 Armenians. Here the first hint of coming trouble was the order that all Armenian soldiers serving in Turkish ranks should be disarmed.
Erzerum is situated on a plateau some 6,000 feet above sea level, and the key forts had been placed on high ground commanding the surrounding country. However well the Russian transport department had done its work, the Russian supply of heavy artillery could not have been overwhelming in the sense that heavy guns were overwhelming on other fronts.
Corroborative and additional evidence is given by the Danish Red Cross nurses who, with a noble disregard of their own safety, accompanied one of these caravans from Erzerum to Erzinjan. They speak of the massacres at Kamakh, of the killing by the river, and of a battue through the cornfields, where the wheat was high, into which some Armenians had escaped.
Mackensen and five divisions had, however, to be diverted from the Balkans, and Russia's offensive in the Bukovina helped to conceal her designs on Erzerum.
Robert Stapleton, an American minister at Erzerum, and by an Armenian woman who was among the deported, and whose life was spared on her embracing Islamism. The convoy numbered, when it left Baiburt, some 15,000 persons, and it reached Erzinjan in safety. There the massacres had already taken place, and the women and children had been deported, for they found no Armenians there.
It is a quiet stream, flowing along in majestic dignity almost from its two sources, in the Armenian mountains, not far from the town of Erzerum, until it is joined by the Tigris in the extreme south. As the Shatt-el Arab, i.e., Arabic River, the two reach the Persian Gulf.
One day I received a visit from an Armenian deputation; its chief was described on his visiting-card as President of the Armenian Republic of the Caucasus. When he was shown into my apartment in the Hôtel Vendôme, I recognized two of its members as old acquaintances with whom I had occasional intercourse in Erzerum, Kipri Keui, and other places during the Armenian massacres of the year 1895.
Erzerum had balanced Kut, and the Cameroons had ceased to be a German land. But these were trifles compared to the gigantic clash of arms in Europe, and here the Germans had done more than in their first year's fighting.
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