Karekin Pastermadjian - World War I

World War I

In the autumn of 1914, a month and a half before the beginning hostilities, he went to the Caucasus on a special mission given after the Armenian congress at Erzurum, and joined the committee which had been appointed by the Armenian National Council of the Caucasus to organize the Armenian volunteer units.

In November of 1914, he accompanied the second battalion of the Armenian volunteers. As the representative of the executive committee of Tiflis, to prepare the local inhabitants, as the Russian army was about to advance into the captured territories of that country.

On November 14, at the Bergmann Offensive, the second battalion of the Armenian volunteers engaged in battle for the first time, near Bayazid. In the course of a bloody combat which lasted twenty-four hours, Dro, the brave commander of the battalion, was seriously wounded, and he was forced immediately to take his place. From that day to March of the following year, he remained at the head of that battalion, and led it into eleven battles in the neighborhood of Alashkert, Toutakh, and Malashkert, until Dro recovered and returned to resume the command.

In the summer of 1915, he went to Van during the Van Resistance. Khetcho (Catchik), his assistant, died on the shores of Lake Van in July 1915.

In the spring of 1917, when the Russian Revolution turned the Caucasus upside down, He and Dr. Hakob Zavriev, was sent from the Caucasus to Petrograd to negotiate with the temporary Russian government concerning Caucasian affairs.

He left for America in June 1917 as the representative of the Armenian National Council of Tiflis. As the special Envoy of His Holiness the Catholicos of all the Armenians,

He was elected to be ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Armenia to the United States in Washington, D.C.