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A party of camel- drivers direct me toward the lost Erzingan trail, and in an hour I am following a tributary of the ancient Lycus River, along a valley where everything looks marvellously green and refreshing; it is as though I have been suddenly transferred into an entirely different country.
Erzingan was added to the Osman Empire in 1473 by Mohammed II, after it had been held by Mongols, Tartars, and Turkomans. With the capture of Erzingan the Russians not only removed the strongest obstacle on the road to Sivas, Angora, and Constantinople, but also virtually completed their occupation of Turkish Armenia.
This stiffening of Turkish resistance necessitated apparently a change in the Russian plans. No longer do we hear now of quick, straight, advances from point to point. But the various objectives toward which the Russians were directing their attacks Trebizond, Erzingan, the Tigris are attacked either successfully or consecutively from all possible directions and points of vantage.
The country now continues hilly rather than mountainous The road is generally too heavy with sand and dust, churned up by the Erzingan mule-caravans, to admit of riding wherever the grade is unfavorable; but much good wheeling surface is encountered on long, gentle declivities and comparatively level stretches.
Fourteen miles from Erzingan, at the entrance to a ravine whence flows the boisterous stream that supplies a goodly proportion of the irrigating water for the valley, is situated a military outpost station. My road runs within two hundred yards of the building, and the officers, seeing me evidently intending to pass without stopping, motion for me to halt.
Closer and closer the Russians approached to the goal for which they had striven for many months, Erzingan. On July 25, 1916, this strongly fortified Turkish city in Central Armenia, fell into the hands of the Russian Caucasus army under Grand Duke Nicholas.
With its barracks and military factories, the city formed an important army base. Erzingan has frequently figured in ancient history. It was here that the Sultan of Rum was defeated by the Mongols in 1243, and in the fourth century St. Gregory, "the Illuminator," lived in the city.
Not until now, for instance, do we hear of further advances toward Erzingan from the north. It will be recalled that as long ago as February 23, 1916, the Russians occupied the town of Ispir, some fifty miles northwest of Erzerum on the river Chorok.
Before long the ravine terminates, and I emerge upon the broad and smiling Erzingan Valley; at the lower extremity of the ravine the stream has cut its channel through an immense depth of conglomerate formation, a hundred feet of bowlders and pebbles cemented together by integrant particles which appear to have been washed down from the mountains-probably during the subsidence of the deluge, for even if that great catastrophe were a comparatively local occurrence, instead of a universal flood, as some profess to believe, we are now gradually creeping up toward Ararat, so that this particular region was undoubtedly submerged.
The retreat of the Turks took a southwesterly direction toward Baiburt along the Trebizond-Erzerum road and toward Erzingan, to which a road branches off the Trebizond-Erzerum road. Baiburt was held by the Turks with a force strong enough to make it impossible for the Russians to cut off the Trebizond garrison.
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