Zweibund — the Dual Alliance — Germany and Austria-Hungary united, were the core of the Central Powers, and here join hands. The bars of Germany's flag border the top left, and those of the Habsburg Austrian Empire and ruling house the bottom right.
Schulter an SchulterUntrennbar vereintin Freud und in Leid!'Shoulder to shoulderInseparably united in joy and in sorrow!
"The kasaba of Tel-Armeni, to which we proceeded, had among other points of interest the ruins of an ancient Christian temple. . . . Among the dark mass of ruins two kiosks of marble or limestone gleamed like white swans. I was attracted to them not only by the inscriptions but by a certain aroma with which I was already familiar. Setting myself to find whence it emanated, I recoiled in horror from a couple of wells or cisterns filled with Christian corpses in an advanced state of putrefaction. A little further on I came upon another subterranean receptacle which, to judge from its insupportable stench, must have been likewise replete with carrion. As if that were not enough, on every hand were unburied corpses and corpses barely covered with heaps of stone from which emerged here and there a bloody tress or an arm or leg gnawed by hyenas. . . . I learned from [the housekeeper of the military chief of Tel-Armeni] who was a Nestorian and the only Christian survivor of the massacre, that the gendarmes and the Arabs, supported by the population of Tel-Armeni, had suddenly attacked the Christian population, cutting them down ruthlessly without giving them time to defend themselves. . . . I seemed to hear at my ear, vibrating like a hyena's laughter, the cynical words of the Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha, 'The massacres? Oh, well! They merely amuse me!'"
Rafael de Nogales was a Venezuelan mercenary and officer in the Ottoman Army who had been Inspector-General of the Turkish Forces in Armenia. In December 1915 he was in Jerusalem when he was ordered to Baghdad in Mesopotamia to serve under German General von der Goltz. He set out from Jerusalem to Damascus, Aleppo, and was on his way to Mosul when he came upon the bodies of victims of Turkey's massacre of its Armenian and other Christian citizens. The Grand Vizier and Interior Minister Talaat Pasha was an overseer of the massacres.
Four Years Beneath the Crescent by Rafael De Nogales, pp. 207, 208, copyright © 1926, by Charles Scribner's Sons, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1926
1915-12-15, December, 1915, Nogales, massacre
