Any historian who has to deal with the last years of the Ottoman Empire will sooner or later find himself wishing desperately that the air could be cleared on the subject of the Ottoman Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and especially the deportations and massacres of 1915. Armenians, the victims of a national trauma comparable in this century only to that of the European Jews, cannot stop remembering, and their conviction that the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians was the unprovoked result of cold-blooded calculation by the Turkish Government is largely accepted in Europe. The almost unanimous Turkish reaction has been to try to forget the whole episode, and when that becomes impossible to seek complete justification for the holocaust in allegations of wholesale disloyalty, treason and revolt by the Ottoman Armenians in the gravest crisis in the history of the Turkish nation - allegations wholly true as far as Armenian sentiment went, only partly true in terms of overt acts, and totally insufficient as a justification for what was done. Just in the past few years some Turks have begun to deal fairly openly with the Turkish measures in 1915, and to admit that they were a gravely disproportionate response to the provocation presented. Ahmed Emin Yalman's recent memoirs 1 for example contain a relatively frank and balanced discussion of the events themselves and of faults and responsibilities in them. Likewise the American Armenian historian Richard Hovannisian has succeeded in treating the massacres of 1915 in considerable detail without losing his respect for evidence, and utters the usual charge that they were the fruition of a deep-laid, satanic plot with much less than the usual conviction.2 But these are isolated exceptions: the great majority of Turkish and Armenian historians remain frozen on this issue in the attitudes their predecessors had already adopted by 1916. The succeeding years have provided much diversion to attract public attention elsewhere, but still the barrage of accusations and counter-accusations rolls on, no longer in the foreground of public debate but conducted with undiminished vigour in terms entirely unchanged over half a century. And every once in a while the old bitterness flares again into life, as it did recently in California with the murder of the Turkish Consul and Vice-Consul there by an Armenian, and in France shortly afterwards with the recall of the Turkish ambassador as a 'gesture of disapproval' at the unveiling in Marseilles of a monument to the memory of '1,500,000 Armenians who were victims of a massacre in 1915 under the orders of the Turkish Government'.