Memorial tribute by M.E. Kreider of the NER Aleppo Unit, prepared for the October 30, 1922, service at the Anglo-American Church in Beirut for Lester James Wright, who was killed by brigands on the evening of Friday, October 27, 1922, while returning from Antioch to Aleppo.
Kreider describes Wright’s relief work at Malatia, where he kept roughly eight hundred children alive — many losing their eyesight from disease — while himself surviving an attack of typhus that nearly killed him, with the nearest competent physician sixty miles away; the long, repeated overland caravans by which Wright led groups of one to four hundred orphans across Anatolia to a railhead bound for Syria, sometimes scattered by attacks; and his arrival in Aleppo on October 25 with a final group of two hundred Greek orphans, after which he accepted Mr. Enoch B. Applegate and Dr. and Mrs. Mylrea’s invitation to visit Antioch and was killed in the ambush of their party on the return road. The funeral, at half past two on Monday afternoon, October 30, drew about two hundred attendees; Mr. Hall of the American University of Beirut delivered the address with a reading from Matthew 25:31–40, and Rev. W. Nesbitt Chambers and Rev. James H. Nicol led the prayers, the latter reading Revelation 21:1–7.
