Note 43 — Front matter (continued 6)

The complaints to which I became a listener were made by maleks, bishops, priests, headmen, and others. Exaggerations prevail, and the same story is often told with as many variations as there are narrators. I cannot vouch for anything which did not come under my own observation. Some narratives dissolved under investigation, leaving a mere nucleus of fact. Those which I thought worthy of being noted down—some of which were published in the Contemporary Review in May and June in two papers called The Shadow of the Kurd—were either fortified by corroborative circumstances, or rest on the concurrent testimony as to the main facts of three independent narrators.

In some cases I was asked to lay the statements before the British Consul at Erzerum, with the names of the narrators as the authority on which they rested, but in the greater number I was implored not to give names or places, or any means of identification. "We are in fear of our lives if we tell the truth," they urged. Sometimes I asked them if they would abide by what they told me in the event of an investigation by the British Vice-Consul at Van. "No, no, no, we dare not!" was the usual reply. Under these circumstances, the only course open to me is to withhold the names of persons and places wherever I was pledged to do so, but as a guarantee of good faith I have placed the statements, confidentially, with the names, in the hands of Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.