leading the disastrous counteroffensive at Sarikamis in the arctic conditions of December and January as a result of which sixty-thousand out of his one hundred-thousand strong army perished. The Russian Army retreated, and Grand Duke Nicholas spent the following year completing preparations for the final invasion of Anatolia. This operation he began on 13 January 1916. Defeating the Ottomans at Pasinler with an army three times the size of their's, the Russians entered Erzurum on 16 February.

The Russians had long been inciting the Armenians to acts of terrorism against the Ottoman state, and providing material and moral support for their revolutionary societies. Now, in pursuit of an independent state in eastern Anatolia, the Armenians collaborated with the Russians on a large scale, many entering the Russian army. Just as Armenian officers had played a prominent role in the 1877 invasion of north-Eastern Anatolian. Distorted and exaggerated accounts by Armenian nationalists of the events of 1915 were seized on by the Entente Powers and used in their propaganda war against the Turks, as they had been so doing for years. Indeed, the same propaganda is still being used at the present time. Since Bediuzzaman was present and actively engaged in the defence of the Empire against the Russians and Armenians, we include the following facts concerning those events, all of which are taken from the second volume of the History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey by the American historians S. J. and E. K. Shaw.

Upon the Russian withdrawal in January 1915, the Ottomans ordered the evacuation of all Armenians from the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum as part of their preparations for the inevitable second invasion. It was arranged that they should settle in the Mosul area of northern Iraq. A special commission was set up to record the Armenians' property, all of which was to be handed back on their return after the War. Just as the army was specifically instructed to protect and provide the needs of the deportees on their Journey. Armenian propagandists claimed that over one million Armenians were massacred in the War. But according to the Ottoman census, the population was 1,300,000, not 2.5 million as claimed. And the number of those transported was no more than 400,000. The figure that died was probably around 200,000, and not only of