which I heard of the treatment to which the Albanian women were
subjected are so revolting as to be unprintable. We spent a night at
Ljaskoviki (also spelled Gliascovichi, Leskovik and Liascovik),
three-quarters of which had been destroyed. Out of a population which, I
was told, originally numbered about 8,000, only 1,200 remain.

[Illustration: THE HEAD MEN OF LJASKOVIKI, ALBANIA, WAITING TO BID MAJOR
AND MRS. POWELL FAREWELL]

Though the great majority of the victims were Mohammedans, the
outrages were not directly due to religious causes but were inspired
mainly by greed for territory. When, upon the erection of Albania into
an independent kingdom in 1913, the Greeks were ordered by the Powers to
withdraw from North Epirus, on which they had been steadily encroaching
and which they had come to look upon as inalienably their own, they are
reported to have begun a systematic series of outrages upon the civil
population of the region for which a fitting parallel can be found only
in the Turkish massacres in Armenia or the horrors of Bolshevik rule in
Russia. In their determination to secure Southern Albania for
themselves, the Greeks apparently adopted the policy followed with such
success in Armenia by the Turks, who asserted cynically that "one cannot
make a state without inhabitants."

I do not think that the Greeks attempt to deny these atrocities--the
evidence is far too conclusive for that--but even as great a Greek as M.
Venizelos justifies them on the ground that they were provoked by the
Albanians. That such things could happen without arousing horror and
condemnation throughout the civilized world is due to the fact that in
the summer of 1914 the attention of the world was focused on events in
France and Belgium. I have no quarrel with the Greeks and nothing is