Siege Diary From the Battle of Marash

Trapped under siege. Hunted through the mountains. One doctor’s unforgettable fight to survive.January 1920. The city of Marash, Turkey, erupts in chaos as Turkish Nationalists lay siege to the streets. Inside the Near East Relief hospital, Dr. Mabel E. Elliott and her staff fight to save lives while trapped under relentless gunfire. Food runs short. Wounded flood in. Escape seems impossible.Dr. Elliott’s firsthand account plunges readers into those desperate weeks of terror and courage, when survival hung by a thread. Her story reaches its climax in a dramatic flight with retreating French troops, an exodus across the snow-choked Taurus Mountains, battling blizzards and exhaustion at every step.Long hidden in newspaper microfilm, this unabridged narrative is one of the most gripping accounts of the Battle of Marash ever written. Raw, immediate, and unforgettable, it reveals the ordeal that later inspired Elliott’s 1924 memoirBeginning Again at Ararat.This is history lived on the edge, told by the woman who endured it.“Your diary is one of the most thrilling articles I have ever had the privilege of reading, and I know something about stories of that sort.”—Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Chairman, American Women’s Hospitals.Read more