On May 11, the terms of peace were handed to two of Ferid’s appointees

at Paris. These terms proposed to close the Greek pincers about

Constantinople, to cut it off from Asia Minor permanently with a

garrison restricted to 700 men, to isolate the Straits from Asia Minor

by the institution of an International Commission on which Russia and

Turkey would be represented if and when they became members of the

League of Nations, and to place what remained of Turkey in Asia Minor

under the permanent military, economic and financial control of Great

Britain, France and Italy. As for Smyrna, “the city of Smyrna and the

territory in Article 66 will be assimilated, in the application of the

present Treaty, to territory detached from Turkey. The city of Smyrna

and the territory defined in Article 66 remain under Turkish

sovereignty. Turkey however transfers to the Greek Government the

exercise of her rights of sovereignty over the city of Smyrna and the

said territory. In witness of such sovereignty the Turkish flag shall

remain permanently hoisted over an outer fort in the town of Smyrna.

The fort will be designated by the Principal Allied Powers…. The Greek

Government may establish a Customs boundary along the frontier line

defined in Article 66, and may incorporate the city of Smyrna and the

territory defined in the said Article in the Greek customs system….

When a period of five years shall have elapsed after the coming into

force of the present Treaty the local parliament referred to in

Article 72 may, by a majority of votes, ask the Council of the League

of Nations for the definitive incorporation in the Kingdom of Greece

of the city of Smyrna and the territory defined in Article 66. The

Council may require, as a preliminary, a plebiscite under conditions

which it will lay down. In the event of such incorporation as a result

of the application of the foregoing paragraph, the Turkish sovereignty

referred to in Article 69 shall cease. Turkey hereby renounces in that

event in favor of Greece all rights and title over the city of Smyrna

and the territory defined in Article 66.” As for Constantinople, it

remained the Turkish capital, but “in the event of Turkey failing to

observe faithfully the provisions of the present Treaty, or of any

treaties or conventions supplementary thereto, particularly as regards

the protection of the rights of racial, religious or linguistic

minorities, the Allied Powers expressly reserve the right to modify

the above provisions, and Turkey hereby agrees to accept any

dispositions which may be taken in this connection.”

There being no Ottoman Parliament in session, Damad Ferid Pasha

summoned eighty prominent Turks to Yildiz Kiosk to authorize signature

of the peace terms. Permitting no discussion of it, Ferid ordered

those who favored signature to stand and, scenting trouble ahead, he

whispered to the Sultan to stand. Considerations of etiquette bade

every one present stand, but the late “Topdjeh” Riza Pasha broke into

vigorous protest. In a voice trembling with emotion, he told Ferid

that the meeting had risen out of respect to the _Padishah_ and not in

resignation to the peace terms, that the meeting had no power to

authorize their signature and that, even if it had, it could not

authorize their signature as long as Anatolia was in open and armed

revolt against them. Without further ado, Ferid declared the signature

of the peace terms authorized and added audibly that Anatolia could go

to the devil.

So the peace terms were signed by three of Ferid’s appointees (one of

them a teacher in an American college near Constantinople) on August

11 at Sevres in the suburbs of Paris. Sevres is in Christendom and the

year was 1920.

XVII

ANGORA

FEVZI, RAFET AND KIAZIM KARABEKR PASHAS AND THEIR MILITARY

DICTATORSHIP UNDER KEMAL PASHA――THE “PONTUS” DEPORTATIONS――MOSUL, THE

KURDS AND THE SPLIT IN ISLAM――THE FRANCO-ARMENIAN FRONT IN CILICIA,

THE GREEK FRONT BEFORE SMYRNA, AND THE ALLIED FRONT BEFORE

CONSTANTINOPLE――HOW THE BROKEN PARLIAMENT WAS RECONSTRUCTED AT

ANGORA――FERID’S COUNTER-REVOLUTION AT KONIA.

Angora lies tilted up on its hill, a gray blanket of flat roofs

pierced with white minarets and green cypresses, and scarred across

its middle with the ruins of 1915. At its foot lies a shallow marsh

stretching from the town itself to its railway station, a mile and a

half away. Along the rim of the basin up whose southern slope it

sprawls, are the summer villas of its wealthier families, secure above

the hot-weather malaria of the marsh.

The heart of the town lies along its lower fringes. When the Sivas

congress moved the Nationalist Party’s council to Angora late in

September, 1919, Kemal himself took up his abode in an upper room at

the railway station and a Decauville locomotive was kept fired up

night and day beneath his window, in readiness to hurry him farther

into the interior on an instant’s warning. The first building one

passes upon entering the town from the railway station is the gray

granite building once used as the local headquarters of the Committee

of Union and Progress, with a wooden theatre lying in the center of a

garden across the road. Some distance to the left, as one continues

into the town, is the old _konak_, or Government building, where the

provincial administration was formerly housed. Across the square in

front of it, is the Post and Telegraph Office. On the right hand as

the town is entered, a broad street turns off past the theatre and

leads around the foot of the town to the beautiful compound of the

Sultana College. Almost opposite the theatre as one turns into this

road, is a large school building of stone and some distance farther

along is the stone building formerly occupied by the local

administration of the Public Debt. Still farther along, far out in the

outkirts of the town, the blue and white buildings of the Sultana

College stand within the walls of their compound. Here Fevzi Pasha, a

towering Anatolian Turk with drooping moustaches, and Rafet Pasha, a

dapper little figure, were engaged in re-mobilizing and re-equipping

the Army. Fevzi Pasha is a dour giant of a man with a gargantuan

appetite for work and a complete aversion from social intercourse of

any sort. Rafet Pasha has a similar capacity for work but he combines

with it a natural genius for social intercourse. I have seen him in a

number of widely varying settings, from his quarters in the Sultana

College to the mountain passes of Anatolia in the dead of winter, but

he is invariably as immaculate both in manner and appearance as if he

had just stepped out of a drawing room.

Under Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha ruled Anatolia

for the Nationalists, their authority reaching down into the provinces

through military governors whom they assigned to the more critical

provincial capitals. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha who held the eastern

provinces from Erzerum, ought to be mentioned with them. It had been

easy enough to take over Anatolia from the Damad Ferid Government, for

the Greek occupation of Smyrna undermined Ferid’s hold on the country

at a stroke, but to hold Anatolia against Ferid’s efforts to recover

it was quite another matter. Fevzi, Rafet and Kiazim were the men who

held it, and whatever traditions of personal advantage they inherited

from the old Ottoman Government, their personal ambitions were sunk in

the common cause of defending the remnant of the country. I believe

firmly that this statement holds true of Kemal as well. My impression

of him is that he would have joined one of his own labor battalions

and dug roads behind his own Army if he thought that by so doing he

would be able more effectively to contribute to his country’s defense.

These men constituted a small handful of modern Westerners in control

of a vast mediaeval Eastern country, but their task was simplified by

the comparative absence of the Levantinism which had poisoned

Constantinople. Such as their country was, it was as homogeneous as

any between Vienna and Bagdad. There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians,

Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians

in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and

Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely

scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The

large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the

non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The

country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its

capital had been for a century. Its handful of Americans were soon

represented at Angora by two members of the Near East Relief’s corps,

the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings. Most of their

contact was with Rafet Pasha and, despite the serious delicacy of

their position, their relations with Rafet Pasha were generally happy.

The military situation in which the Turks found themselves, was

shortly to be simplified by the brief war which Kiazim Karabekr Pasha

launched from Erzerum against the Armenian Republic of Erivan. This

opened a line of retreat to Trans-Caucasia and Central Asia, and if

Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas had been forced to drop their archives

into their _kalpaks_ and flee, a back door would have been available

for their escape into the East.

The Pontus project which the Greeks along the Black Sea littoral had

launched, was not so simple to handle. The Greek occupation of Smyrna

eventually made it necessary to transfer the Third Army from Amasia to

the hinterland of Smyrna and the so-called Pontus had to be held with

irregulars under the command of the late Osman Agha, the Laz mayor of

Kerasund. The crude terrorism he wielded proved to be such an ugly

business that Hamid Bey, one of the best men available in Angora, was

dispatched to Samsun as mayor. Hamid Bey is a Rhodes Turk with

up-standing hair, Kaiser-like moustaches, a mouth full of gold and a

booming voice, a combination apt to give one meeting him for the first

time a sense of having met some new species of wild man, but a further

acquaintance with him reveals beneath his surface eccentricities a

character of solid integrity and ripe judgment. He had been a governor

of provinces and the fact that the post of mayor in Samsun was thought

worthy of being filled by an ex-governor may be taken as an indication

of Rafet Pasha’s anxiety to discover some peaceful solution of the

Pontus problem. Osman Agha’s terrorism remained as much of a problem

at Angora as the Greek terrorism which it sought to overcome, but a

solution was finally discovered for it when Osman, having shot down

900 Greeks and Armenians in Marsovan in reprisal for the knifing of

200 Turks by Greek troops at Ismid, marched to Angora to offer himself

and his Laz followers to the Army. He entered Angora as the hero of a

goaded and angry population and Kemal, after permitting him to enjoy

his ovation to the full, incorporated his followers in the Turkish

shock troops with whom they were cut to pieces in the Battle of the

Sakaria River. Thereafter there were no more Marsovans in the

so-called Pontus, but the problem of its Greeks still remained.

There appears to be no doubt that the Pontus program had reached the

status of a definite organization determined on independence, an

organization which was peculiarly difficult to combat by reason of the

fact that any move against it would be disseminated in the Black Books

of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople as evidence of

“persecution of the Christians.” Believing that one of the

organization’s centers was a body of Greek students which called

itself the Pontus Literary Society in the American college at

Marsovan, Angora requested Dr. George E. White, president of the

college, to suppress the Society. Possibly forgetting that the country

was in a state of war and nowhere more bitterly so than in Marsovan,

Dr. White refused to suppress the Society. Angora thereupon suppressed

the college, deporting its American teaching staff to the coast whence

they were removed to Constantinople. A number of Greeks were then

arrested in Marsovan on evidence which Angora believed indicated their

activity in the Greek organization; they were removed to Angora,

placed on trial before a military court under a charge of treason in

time of war, convicted and hung. But the tumult in the so-called

Pontus still continued. Greek and Turkish irregulars burned each

other’s villages and ambushed each other in the fields. This sort of

thing dragged along until 1922, when Angora, having failed to break up

the Greek organization, deported into the interior the entire Greek

population along the Black Sea, men, women and children alike.

Once these deportations had been ordered at Angora, their execution

was of necessity left to the local police chiefs and the manner of

their execution varied with the temper of the local police chiefs and

the amount of supplies available in each province. Both the police

chiefs and the amounts of supplies available varied widely, and the

treatment of the deportees on the march varied accordingly. The report

which Dr. Mark Ward, the Near East Relief worker who was deported from

Kharput, made to the British Foreign Office in London as well as to

his own Government in Washington, indicates that their sufferings at

Kharput were heavy. Dr. Ward in his report laid the blame for their

sufferings on Angora. Whether, once other methods had failed to break

up the Greek Pontus organization, Angora possessed the means to make

deportation a bearable process for the Greeks, is a question which in

the lack of conclusive evidence must remain unanswered here. It seems

to me more to the point, however, to point out the original guilt of

those who landed the Greeks in Asia Minor without the means of

protecting them there. The “Pontus” episode is not the first in which

Western Powers have permitted the Greeks to expose their own people to

danger in the hope that their sufferings will attract Western

assistance. There are minorities in every country between Vienna and

Bagdad and their exposure to danger constitutes part of the

_technique_ of Balkan statecraft. Greek atrocities at Ismid resulted

in Osman Agha’s reprisals at Marsovan. It is not impossible that that

was the purpose with which Greek atrocities along the Marmora shore

began. Certainly it is difficult to find any other purpose in the

conduct of Greek regular troops. Thus it is that Balkan peoples draw

their new frontiers. Thus it has been for a century and thus

presumably it will continue to be, as long as the West permits.

It seems to me (and I must add in fairness that my knowledge of the

“Pontus” deportations, while gleaned at Angora and the Oecumenical

Patriarchate alike, is purely second-hand) that it is open to question

whether Angora’s deportation of Greek women was justified and whether

it made the fullest use of such scanty supplies as it had in caring

for the deportees on the march. On the other hand, the action of the

British in disembarking the Greeks into the “Pontus” without protest

from the Oecumenical Patriarchate, could only be justified if the

Turks remained helpless and passive. As soon as Nationalism began to

gather strength in the interior, the most elemental sense of humanity

on the part of the British and the Oecumenical Patriarchate should

have prompted negotiations with Angora looking toward the

re-embarkation of the “Pontus” women and the humane internment of the

men.

The deportation of the “Pontus” Greeks and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha’s

victory over the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia kept

Angora’s rear open. The British front in the Mosul province of

Mesopotamia has never threatened Angora’s rear, for the mountainous

nature of the country ahead of them has made impossible any further

advance on the part of the British. Here the British have sought to

partition the Kurdish population, leaving its northern half to Angora

and incorporating its southern half in the Arab State of Iraq. Whether

the chiefs of the Kurdish tribes prefer to be under Turkish rule or

under Arab rule or independent under the British aegis, is a question

to which Angora and Bagdad furnish widely varying answers. It seems

probable, however, that Kurdish opinion, such as it is, does not

relish partition and if there are Kurdish deputies at Angora, it is

because the Turks are the only parties to the Mosul controversy who do

not propose to divide the Kurdish country. There is a wider aspect,

however, to the Mosul controversy. Turks and Arabs alike are _Sunni_

Moslems and as long as the British can maintain a controversy over

Mosul between the new Turkish State and the Arab State of Iraq, Islam

remains in a divided condition. It is the desire to abstain from any

action over Mosul which might widen that breach, which has prompted

Djavid Pasha, the Turkish commander at Diarbekr, to refrain from the

use of force in the recovery of Mosul. The _sheikh_ of the Senussi who

girded the late Caliph on his accession to the Throne in 1918, and who

fled from Brussa to Angora when the Greeks entered Smyrna, has been at

Diarbekr for the last three years, attempting to heal the Turco-Arab

breach over Mosul. Thus far, the conduct of the Turkish command on the

Mosul “front” has been marked by a conspicuous restraint.

As Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas looked toward the West, they were

confronted by three military fronts, the Cilician front on their left,

the Greek front behind Smyrna on their center, and the Allied

occupation of Constantinople on their right. In the winter of

1919-’20, the British high command in Cairo withdrew its forces from

Cilicia in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916,

to Palestine, leaving the French command at Beirut in sole occupation

of the northern end of the Syrian corridor and of Cilicia. Here, under

the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out

and the Turkish administration had withdrawn to Bozanti, a town at the

top of the Taurus Range. The French front extended from the Taurus

east to the Mosul province, but it was in Cilicia that the weight of

the French occupation made itself chiefly felt. The Armenians revenged

the undoubted wrongs which they had suffered under the Ottoman Sultans

in drastic fashion and there were streets even in Adana itself in

which it was not safe for a Turk to show himself after dark. The

Turkish towns outside the rim of the French area, possibly inflamed by

the tales of Turkish refugees from Adana, soon launched a guerilla

warfare against the Franco-Armenian regular troops and began isolating

out-lying garrisons. Much of this was directed by the Turkish

ex-administration at Bozanti, but it was carried on largely by Turkish

irregulars with any following which they could impress into service.

As for the Greek front behind Smyrna, the first defense which was used

was that of the Circassian bandit leader, Edhem, but the Greek command

soon won him over and made a considerable hero of him. This left

Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas without defense and the skeleton Third

Army which was hastily transferred from Amasia, covering Samsun, to

the Smyrna front was too depleted in strength to offer effective

resistance. Nuri Ismet Pasha, a slight deaf man but an able pupil of

von der Goltz and the Potsdam War College, was given command on the

Smyrna front and the hasty extemporization of munition factories began

at Konia in his rear. Until his forces should be built up to an

effective strength, however, he restricted himself to keeping in touch

with the Greeks, and with all of Asia Minor behind him in which to

maneuvre, he traded territory for time whenever the Greeks showed an

inclination to move. Luckily for Angora, the Greeks sat waiting on the

Allies and attempted little movement after their first rush ended.

Thus hemmed about with enemies, the Nationalist Party had won a

clean-cut political victory by installing its Parliamentary majority

in Constantinople, and its troops had penetrated into the very suburbs

of the capital in search of surrendered munitions with which to

re-equip themselves. Although the Mudros armistice had been torn up at

the Greek occupation of Smyrna and a state of war again existed,

Angora was in close telegraphic communication with Rauf Bey, the

leader of its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople. Indeed, with

the British Navy commanding those sections of its perimeter which were

not in the occupation of enemy Armies, Angora’s wire to Constantinople

constituted its only means of communication with the West.

But on the night of March 15-16, 1920, General Milne isolated

Constantinople from Anatolia, conducted a series of lightning raids at

midnight in Stamboul, arrested Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues for

deportation to Malta, and not only cut off Angora from the legal

Parliamentary machinery which it had spent eight months in building

up, but cut it off from any means of effective communication with the

West. This was a staggering blow. Angora immediately ordered the

arrest of the few British officers who remained in Asia Minor, chief

among them Lord Rawlinson’s brother who was jailed at Erzerum, but

with Rauf Bey and his colleagues on their way to Malta as prisoners of

the British, the Nationalists lost some of the best brains in the

Party. The Italians soon opened their cable from Adalia to Rhodes

whence a wireless was in communication with Rome, but Angora’s sole

contact with the West was even then at the disposal of a foreign

Power.

Within the next few weeks, deputies who had escaped General Milne’s

midnight raids in Stamboul, began filtering into Angora and an attempt

to reconstruct the shattered Parliament began. A month was allowed for

escaped deputies to reach Angora and claim their seats in the new

Parliament, and the seats of others who had been interned on Malta

were awarded in new “elections,” one of which is said to have been

held in the Asiatic suburbs of Constantinople itself where Italian

forces were in occupation; Italy has never relished the hurried Greek

occupation of Smyrna.

So on April 23, 1920, the reconstructed Parliament, with deputies

sitting for constituencies in all the areas covered by the Erzerum

program, from Thrace to Mosul, began its session in the old Committee

of Union and Progress building in Angora, under the new name of the

Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Mustapha Kemal Pasha was made

Commander-in-Chief and President, Fevzi Pasha became Chief of the

General Staff and Prime Minister, Rafet Pasha became Minister of War

and Interior, and the deputies acquiesced in the military dictatorship

which they found at Angora. Even in the West, democracy does not

thrive in time of war, nor did it in the war-ringed isolation of

Angora. Forty percent requisitions, accompanied by ruinously heavy

taxation afforded, not enough money to balance the Assembly’s budgets,

but enough to enable Fevzi and Rafet Pashas to continue re-mobilizing

and re-equipping the Army.

On April 6, Damad Ferid Pasha again became _Grand Vizier_ in

Constantinople and began at once a determined effort to regain a

foothold in Anatolia. Fevzi and Rafet Pashas replied to him with a

series of so-called Military Courts of Independence, before which any

late Ottoman subject suspected of anti-Nationalism could be brought,

tried under the Army code for treason in time of war, and if convicted

summarily hung. In the Nationalist view, the Ottoman Sultanate and the

Ottoman Government had alike ceased to exist on the night of March

15-16, 1920, and Damad Ferid Pasha, with the prestige of the Ottoman

Caliphate at his disposal, now added himself to the Western enemies

who surrounded Angora in a final struggle for the possession of the

new Turkish State.

The Greeks were hurriedly flung in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha

making no attempt to oppose them, and from behind them Ferid in

Constantinople appealed to Old Turkish opinion at Konia to uphold the

conservative usages of Islam and denounce the Nationalists. It was an

appeal which had helped to nullify the Young Turkish Revolution in

1908, which had helped to keep the old Empire in the stiff dead grip

of religious usage. It was a very powerful appeal and the Greek

command at Smyrna lost no time in re-inforcing it by proclaiming its

solicitude for the Caliphate of Islam. Moslem and Christian reaction

were the rocks on which the 1908 Revolution had come to grief and the

Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in dropping them into the channel

which the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 would have to thread. Since

Greeks and Armenians were then at war with Turkey, Christian reaction

had no standing at Angora, but Moslem reaction is a rock which Turkey

is to this day still engaged in passing and will be for some years to

come. Ferid had no more powerful weapon with which to attack the

Nationalist hold on the conservative peasantry of Asia Minor and on

the dervish _tekkes_ of Konia. The Nationalists could handle their

strong but docile peasantry, but if the worst came to the worst at

Konia the Nationalists could make it plain that Indian and Algerian

Moslems had fought against the Ottoman Government during the war and

that in the new Turkish State the needs of the country took precedence

over the letter of Moslem law.

From April 6, 1920, when Damad Ferid Pasha re-entered office in

Constantinople, a Nationalist coastguard was instituted on the

Mediterranean opposite Konia in order to oppose any attempt at a

landing, whether by Ferid’s followers from the capital or by Greeks

engaged in the interesting business of proclaiming their solicitude

for Islam. Konia itself, a dusty wind-swept provincial capital on the

Anatolian plateau, replete with old Seljukian and pre-Seljukian

mosques, was linked with Angora by a great semi-circle of railway line

which bent westward _via_ Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar, and

thrice-a-week trains made the journey in eighteen hours. At the same

time, this bend of railway line was identical from Eski-Shehr to Afium

with another bend from Constantinople to Smyrna. With Smyrna and its

hinterland in Greek hands, the Greek command added to its new interest

in Islam a scheme for the revival under Greek auspices of the old

Seljukian Empire with its seat at Konia. The Seljukian program is

another of the ghosts which became stirred to life when the Ottoman

Empire went down in 1918 to join the dead.

Ferid’s agents and Greek agents kept slipping through the Greek lines

toward Konia and moving back and forth under the coasts of Asia Minor

with their eyes on Konia. In the British view, the Ottoman dynasty had

lost the Caliphate in 1914 when it was used to declare a holy war

against the British and their Allies. Events at Mecca had since

changed the British view, but if the Caliphate were not too serious a

matter for light speaking, it might be added that in the Nationalist

view the British lost the Caliphate in 1920 when they used it to

declare a holy war against the Nationalists. Ferid finally recovered

Konia in the counter-revolution of October, 1920, but Rafet Pasha

hurried 2,000 men down the railway from Angora, occupied Ala-ed-Din

hill in the outskirts of the city and drove out Ferid’s administration

in three days of sharp fighting. Rafet Pasha appointed as military

governor of Konia, Ghalib Pasha, a tall white-haired Albanian who had

defended the Caliphate as Ottoman commander in the Hejaz during the

war, and the _tchelebi_ of the Mevlevi dervishes whose historic right

it had been to gird each Caliph with the Prophet’s Sword forty days

after his accession to the Throne, went to Angora as one of Konia’s

eight deputies in the Grand National Assembly. So the Seljukian ghost

was laid and the Caliphate came into the Nationalists’ keeping.

The Nationalist hold on the interior of Asia Minor now became

indisputable. The munition factories in the rear of Ismet Pasha’s

slowly growing forces on the Smyrna front, were quickly enlarged and

Konia became a war-center of the first importance in the interior. A

considerable number of Armenians who had been returned to Konia after

the Mudros armistice and who had voluntarily remained in their homes

when the British offered to evacuate them at the time of their own

evacuation of the Bagdad Railway, had been compromised anew by the

Greek occupation of Smyrna and were placed under increasing military

surveillance as the number of Turkish munition factories in the town

grew. Armenian “indiscretions,” however, finally led to the

deportation of men of military age farther into the interior, and the

locking up of their churches in Konia. The juxtaposition of a Turkish

munition factory and an Armenian church is one which is possibly apt

to produce “indiscretions.” When I was last in Konia, the only

Armenians there were women and children. A number of mosques in the

town had been taken over for military depots, but no Armenian church

in the town had been so taken over. The churches were locked up but

otherwise untouched. The Armenian women in the town were permitted to

receive no mail from the outside world, for the Nationalist censors

were supposed to read Turkish and French only, not Armenian. No Turk

ever learns Armenian, and apparently there was no Armenian in whose

loyalty the Turks had sufficient confidence to enable them to entrust

Armenian mail to him for censorship. The Armenian women were being

taxed to the point of robbery, and so were their Turkish neighbors.

Ghalib Pasha told me that he was treating Turks and Armenians on a

basis of scrupulous equality, and I believe that he meant precisely

what he said. If there were enough men like Ghalib Pasha in Turkey to

fill all the provincial administrations, Turkey would be a model

country. But men like Ghalib Pasha are not appointed chiefs of police

in highly delicate places like Konia.

Damad Ferid Pasha did not cease his efforts to regain a foothold in

Anatolia, after his brief counter-revolution in Konia. With the Greek

advance in the spring and summer of 1921, his agents renewed their

activities along the coasts. In Smyrna the Greeks welcomed them and in

Mersina, the port of Cilicia, the French and Armenians welcomed them.

Their work increased with the 1921 Greek offensive, until Nationalist

agents boarded the British steamer _Palatina_ at Adalia, discovered

Topal Osman and four confederates hidden in a cargo hold, and shot

them down. It was a wholly illegal proceeding but it put an end to

Ferid’s efforts to return to Anatolia. Incidentally, it so embarrassed

the Italians who were occupying Adalia under the secret war-time

agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, that they evacuated their zone.

Technically, they had been hostile to the Turks but actually their

hostility was directed to the Greeks in Smyrna. Their departure now

afforded the Nationalists their first access to the Mediterranean, and

their first representation in the West was soon at Rome.

[Illustration: REAR-ADMIRAL COLBY M. CHESTER, U. S. N. (RETIRED)

To whose associates the First Grand National Assembly granted the huge

development program known as the Chester Concession.]

[Illustration: REAR-ADMIRAL MARK L. BRISTOL, U. S. N.

United States High Commissioner at Constantinople from February, 1919,

to the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States

and Turkey.]

XVIII

TURKISH NATIONALISM

THE WESTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT TO WHICH THE GRAND NATIONAL

ASSEMBLY WAS BUILT――HOW NATIONALISM WAS CREATED――GREEK DEFEAT AT THE

SAKARIA RIVER――PEACE WITH THE FRENCH IN CILICIA――AMERICAN ARMENIANISM

AND CILICIA――HOW A CIVILIAN ADMINISTRATION WAS BEGUN AT ANGORA WHILE

FEVZI PASHA WAS RE-MOBILIZING AND RE-EQUIPPING THE TURKISH ARMIES.

When the Grand National Assembly opened its first session on April 23,

1920, in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora, the Crescent

and Star went up on the flag-staff atop the building and, although

trenches were dug for its military defense if necessary, the Turkish

flag has flown there night and day ever since it was first hoisted. At

one corner of the grounds, just outside the trenches which encircle

the building, a gallows was erected. In a little restaurant near the

Assembly building, I have sat at luncheon with that gallows looking in

through the window. I have thought several times as I sat there of a

number of worthy Americans at home who might have held less simple

views on Near and Middle Eastern subjects in days gone by, if they

could have sat at luncheon in Angora with the cross-beam and pulley of

that gallows looking in upon them.

The Assembly building itself contains a single floor with a corridor

down its middle, a row of committee rooms on one side and a

comparatively large chamber on the other. The chamber was equipped for

the Assembly’s use by the construction of a high desk for “Mr.

Speaker” in the center of one wall and a lower desk in front of it to

be used by deputies in addressing the Assembly. Grouped in

semi-circular fashion around the Speaker’s desk, the small desks to be

used by the deputies themselves were crowded upon the floor of the

chamber in long rows. Half-way up the side walls, small galleries were

built for visitors. The whole equipment was of wood. It looked like a

school-room. It was a school-room, possibly as bitter a school-room as

any nation has ever attended.

The 342 deputies of the Assembly were in large part, and still are,

Easterners engaged in adapting the Western governmental tradition to

their own uses, but they have never sold their great Eastern

birthright for a mess of Western pottage. When they gathered for their

first session at 1 o’clock on April 23, 1920, a small motto, done in

Turkish script of white on a blue ground, a quotation from the _Koran_

such as may be found in thousands of devout Moslem homes, was hung on

the wall above the Speaker’s desk. A free translation of it into

English would be: “Let us meet together in council and discuss.” It

was the ground on which the new force of nationalism was carrying the

conservative peasantry of Anatolia behind the Caliph in Constantinople

to the _Koran_ itself, on which it was wrenching Anatolia away from

the Sultan and his _Grand Vizier_ while refraining from any violation

of its allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate.

Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o’clock every day but

Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western

dress and _kalpaks_, officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army

days, and _hojas_ in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in

personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of

Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs

who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both

within the chamber and in the corridor without, was continual and the

intermittent tinkle of the Speaker’s hand-bell did little to abate it,

for the Assembly at Angora is as noisy as all other Parliaments are.

The military dictatorship which Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha wielded

over Anatolia was in the Eastern tradition, but in the institution of

the Assembly a Western plant began taking root in the Eastern soil of

Anatolia. The military dictatorship would pass with the war but the

Assembly was intended to be permanent and it was fashioned in

readiness to begin functioning as soon as the war permitted. In its

structure, the Western tradition was adapted to what were believed to

be the country’s needs. It was necessarily fashioned to a theory at

first, for the number of enemies who ringed it about made a

dictatorship essential. As the war approached its end, as more men and

more money became available, practice might modify it but with the

loss of the Parliament at Constantinople it afforded the only attempt

at an ultimately civilian administration which the country possessed.

This is the theory to which it was built: Under the Ottoman

Constitution, as revived by the 1908 Revolution, the powers of

declaring war and peace, of dissolving Parliament, of receiving

diplomatic representatives of foreign States, and of appointing the

Cabinet and the Senate, had been vested in the Sultan. In the creation

of the Grand National Assembly, the Sultan was deposed and his

prerogatives were re-distributed. The Assembly itself became the seat

of authority and since its sessions were fixed by its fundamental law

at two years’ duration, no right of dissolving it was admitted. The

power of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States was

delegated to the President of the Assembly. The power of appointing

the Cabinet was taken by the Assembly and since its Ministers were

made individually responsible to the Assembly, both the executive and

the legislative functions of government were retained in its hands.

The Senate disappeared with the Sultan and the Government of the Grand

National Assembly became radically republican in structure.

Differences of opinion existed in the Nationalist Party respecting its

permanent structure, a small school of monarchist opinion holding that

a form of government so unreservedly republican would not show itself

suited to the country’s peace-time needs, but for the time being

domestic controversies were buried deeply beneath the urgencies of the

military situation. No differences of opinion have existed among

Westerners who know the East, however. It has long been a belief in

the West that the East can only be ruled by Sultans. We Westerners may

be right or we may be wrong in our views of the East, but Turkish

Nationalism has thrown us a most direct challenge in the out-and-out

republicanism of its Grand National Assembly. When the war ends, we

shall see what we shall see.

The Grand National Assembly speedily set about the elaboration of a

fundamental law which may be taken as the Constitution in embryo of

the new Turkish State. It was finally adopted on June 17, 1920, and

its more important clauses translate from Turkish into English as

follows:

“Article I. Sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation. The

administration of the nation’s sovereignty is based on the principle

of the direct decision of the people.

“Article II. The executive power as well as the legislative power are

concentrated in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey which alone

represents the nation.

“Article III. Turkey is governed by the Grand National Assembly and

its Government is entitled ‘the Government of the Grand National

Assembly.’

“Article IV. The Grand National Assembly is composed of members

elected by the inhabitants of provinces.

“Article V. The election of members of the Grand National Assembly

takes place once in every two years. The duration of membership is two

years only. Members may be re-elected. The Assembly continues its

session until the new Assembly is convened. In case it is impossible

to hold new elections, the session of the Assembly may be prolonged

for one year only. Each member of the Grand National Assembly

represents not only his province but is also a representative of the

nation.

“Article VI. The general session of the Grand National Assembly takes

place on the first of November without convocation.

“Article VII. Fundamental rights such as the enactment dispositions of

the _Sheriat_ (Moslem law), the making, modification and abrogation of

laws, the conclusion of conventions and treaties of peace, and the

call for the defense of the country, belong to the Grand National

Assembly. The making of laws shall be based on principles of

jurisprudence which are most closely adapted to the needs of the

nation and to the requirements of its customs and habits. The powers

and duties of the council of mandatory Ministers of the nation shall

be determined by special laws.

“Article VIII. The Grand National Assembly administers its

governmental departments through mandatory Ministers elected by the

Assembly, according to rules to be provided in a special law. It is

the Grand National Assembly which instructs the mandatory Ministers in

executive matters and if necessary changes the Ministers….

“Article XI. In local matters, the province has an autonomous

personality. With the exception of internal and external policy, the

_Sheriat_, justice, military affairs, international economic

relations, government imposts and inter-provincial matters, the

provinces are charged with the administration, under laws to be

promulgated by the Grand National Assembly, of the _Evkaf_ (Moslem

religious endowments), educational institutions, sanitary services,

local economics, agriculture, public works and social services….”

The remaining articles outline the organization of the provincial and

sub-provincial administrations. In this fundamental law, the

Nationalist Revolution of 1920 undertakes to effect the same

decentralization in administration as the Young Turkish Revolution of

1908 failed to effect. It undertakes infinitely more than that. At a

single stroke, it lifts the new Turkish State out of the dead grip of

ancient religious usage which strangled the 1908 Revolution, which in

fact made effective revolution of any sort a traditional and hackneyed

impossibility in the old Ottoman Empire. Whether the new Turkish State

will succeed in maintaining its new and highly promising freedom from

the stiff religious traditions which imprisoned the old Empire,

remains to be seen. Christian reaction has been met and defeated on

the field of battle, but Moslem reaction is still suppressed by the

iron hand of the Assembly’s Treason Law. Hidden away in the bitter

loneliness of Anatolia, the Nationalist Party has used drastic methods

in laying the foundations of its Western governmental structure in the

Eastern soil of Anatolia. If those foundations have been well and

firmly laid, we have something new in the East at last.

Westerners who did not penetrate the thick veil of war which screened

Anatolia from the world during its years of seige, will not find it

easy to realize the suspicion with which it regarded us in the West.

Deceived again and again by Mr. Lloyd George, goaded by repeated Greek

atrocities unwittingly reinforced by wild atrocity tales to which the

hospitable American press opened its columns, only a man of Mustapha

Kemal Pasha’s iron patience could have compelled his angry countrymen

to persevere in the search for a peaceful escape from the fate which

loomed above them on every frontier. Yet amid the suspicion which

possessed Anatolia during those hard years, the Nationalist Party

created a new and very real human force known as nationalism.

Patriotism, love of one’s own soil, is a Western sentiment which would

have required a generation under normal circumstances for its

transplantation to the Eastern soil of Anatolia, but under the

circumstance of a Greek Smyrna, it sprang into existence overnight.

The Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, travelling from village to village

in Anatolia with a Turkish officer attached to him, added fuel to the

new flame of nationalism with his old cry, “_I am a Turk; my race and

language are great._” Newspaper plants, smuggled out from

Constantinople, pieces of press machinery concealed in travellers’

baggage, handfuls of type dropped into travellers’ pockets, produced

new dailies and weeklies in Anatolia which poured more fuel on the new

flame. The whole culture of the Turks was moved bit by bit from the

old capital to the new center of the nation’s life. Rafet Pasha’s

Military Courts of Independence suppressed any attempt to quench the

new flame. These Courts were a harsh reminder that there was such a

thing as a distinctive Middle Eastern civilization and that it had

come to a time when there was no longer any room in Anatolia for

natives who were not loyal to their own civilization. The old

religious divisions which had split the Anatolian population swiftly

melted away in the heat of the new flame. Papa Eftim Effendi gave up

his community rights and sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior

followed him into the new Turkish Orthodox Church, agreeing to appoint

no metropolitans except those who could read and write Turkish, who

were of Ottoman parentage, who had lived at least five years in the

country and who had abstained from “political activity.” They agreed

furthermore that metropolitans accused of secular crimes, instead of

being immune from arrest without having first been degraded and then

being subject to imprisonment only in the Oecumenical Patriarchate,

were to be arrested and tried as any other Turkish subject would be.

Moslems permitted a new personage called the Minister of Sacred Law to

become an ordinary member of the Cabinet at Angora, and the huge

wealth which was locked up in the country’s Moslem endowments was

opened and placed at the disposition of the provincial administrations.

Moslem courts and schools were taken over by the Ministers of Justice

and Education, respectively. Although American churchmen still thought

in terms of the old Ottoman Empire, still played upon the old

religious division between Moslems and Christians which had proved the

ruin of them both, the new political force of nationalism was blending

them in Turkey as in Syria, in Palestine and in Egypt. Nationalism is

a strangely new and Western force in the East today and thus far

Anatolia has clung to it in the face of every effort which Mr. Lloyd

George and American churchmen could exert to throw the country back

into the ruin of its bitter past.

For a year after the Greeks landed at Smyrna on May 15, 1919, they sat

in the hinterland of the great port waiting for the Sevres Treaty,

while Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha worked like Trojans at Angora. In

May, 1920, they threw their screen in front of the Straits, Ismet

Pasha making no effort to molest them. In November, 1920, Old Greece

finally rid itself of Mr. Venizelos, a wedge was driven between Athens

and the Phanar, and the French made Constantine an excuse for

disentangling themselves from the Greeks. Royalist officers now took

over the front behind Smyrna with no respect for the Allied veto on a

drive toward Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar. With these two railway

junctions occupied, the Greeks would possess the great semi-circle of

railway which runs from Constantinople to Smyrna, and the Turks would

be deprived of the interior Angora-Konia line with which they were

secretly re-mobilizing and re-equipping their Armies on the Smyrna

front. Accordingly in January, 1921, the Royalist Greek command tried

its strength from Brussa toward Eski-Shehr and retired without

encountering Turkish opposition. The situation was now plain.

Eski-Shehr and Afium were theirs whenever they cared to take them. As

for Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha at Angora, they had imposed a strict

embargo on travellers into the interior of Anatolia and the secrecy

they succeeded in preserving was one of their striking successes.

Two months later, in March, 1921, the Royalist Greek command launched

its double advance, the Southern Army moving on Afium from Ushak, the

Northern Army on Eski-Shehr from Brussa. To their surprise, both

advances encountered organized Turkish forces of considerable

strength. The Southern Army, against stiff opposition, succeeded in

occupying Afium but the Northern Army, following the route it had

walked over in January, ran into a murderous battle at Inë-Onü and had

to fall back to its old position at Brussa, the Southern Army falling

back from Afium to Ushak with it. That battle was the first meeting of

Greek and Turkish troops in Asia Minor and is today one of the epics

of the new Turkey.

Inë-Onü was the first evidence the Greeks had of what Fevzi Pasha and

Rafet Pasha had been doing at Angora, and Athens began feverishly to

increase its forces in order to administer a “knockout” before Ismet

Pasha’s command should be built up into a regular Army. Athens was

ready by July and three Armies, starting from the southern, center and

northern fronts, were ordered to converge on Kutahia, about half-way

between Eski-Shehr and Afium. The operations developed according to

plan, Kutahia fell, Eski-Shehr was evacuated under the threat of

encirclement and, although Ismet Pasha pounded at the exhausted Greeks

in Eski-Shehr for ten days, the Greeks held and Ismet Pasha withdrew

to the Sakaria River, covering Angora itself. The Greek command had

won the railway junctions of Eski-Shehr and Afium and now possessed

the bend of railway line which connects Constantinople and Smyrna. The

Turkish command had lost its interior railway line and the only

connection between Angora and Konia was now a carriage road over which

the two towns were five days apart.

Still lured by the possibility of a “knockout,” the Greek command now

rested for a month and then resumed its march. Toward the end of

August, it re-established contact with the Turks on the Sakaria River,

where Field Marshal Mustapha Kemal Pasha had taken command in person.

At Angora the civil Government had made preparations for evacuation to

Caesarea, crowds of refugees had thronged the already overcrowded

town, and occupants of larger dwellings were dispossessed to make room

for military hospitals.

The Battle of the Sakaria River which ensued, was another Inë-Onü but

on a larger scale. It lasted three weeks and even Kemal Pasha himself

was wounded in the course of it, although the only announcement which

was made of his injury in Angora was a brief _communique_ to the

effect that he had “fallen from his horse.” Attempting to encircle the

Turkish left, the Greek command drove south across an area of desert

but Kemal pulled down his forces to meet them. The Greeks drove inland

forty miles in a vain endeavor to find the Turkish left, and finally

changing their plan of battle, threw themselves against the Turkish

lines in a straight frontal engagement, some of the Greek attacks

driving all the way through and then being held up by the failure of

flanking regiments to follow them. Heavy Turkish counter-attacks

finally made it plain that the Greek command had underestimated the

Turkish strength and that the long Greek lines of communication

exposed it to the risk of a disorderly retreat. By the middle of

September, the Greek command began pulling back its forces, burning

Turkish villages as they went. By the first of October, the Greeks

were back in their old positions covering the railway junctions at

Eski-Shehr and Afium and the Turkish recovery of Smyrna became only a

matter of time. By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen

and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief’s representatives in

Angora, compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which

the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the

Near East Relief’s headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East

Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never

published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Smyrna.

The Turkish victory on the banks of the Sakaria radically changed the

political complexion of the Near and Middle East. For 200 years, the

West had been breaking down the old Ottoman Empire, but on the Sakaria

River it encountered the Turk himself and when it touched the Turk the

tide of history turned. History will one day find in this obscure

engagement on the Sakaria one of the decisive battles of our era.

The French Foreign Office which had been waiting on the outer rim of

events ever since the Mudros armistice deprived the French Army of its

anticipated sole command in Constantinople, now dispatched M. Henry

Franklin-Bouillon to Angora, where he negotiated the Franco-Turkish

peace agreement of October 20, 1921. Although the covering letter from

Yusuf Kemal Bey, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Government, contains

the only reference to “economic preference” which marked the result of

the Franklin-Bouillon negotiations, the French Foreign Office probably

hoped in this agreement not only to put an end to the expensive state

of war which the French command at Beirut was facing in Cilicia, but

also to salvage the Perier railway concession which had been the

subject of French negotiations with the old Ottoman Government in

1914. A French loan of £22,000,000 had been offered the old Government

in February of that year of which £16,000,000 was paid in the

following April, the French Perier group taking in return a concession

for 1,800 miles of railway line in northern and eastern Anatolia. The

loan, however, had never been completed, the concession had never been

ratified by the old Parliament and it seems quite probable that, even

if it had been, the war would have cancelled it. But peace in Cilicia

had become an urgent necessity, for the Turkish forces were slowly

pushing the Franco-Armenian Armies back toward the sea. To secure

peace, as well as any other objectives which M. Franklin-Bouillon may

have had in mind, the French Foreign Office surrendered to Turkey a

long strip of territory, beginning with Cilicia and running east to

the Mosul province, a French company, however, maintaining the right

of operating the Bagdad Railway from the port of Mersina in Cilicia to

its eastern terminus on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia.

News of this surrender so embittered the French Army that General

Dufieux, the French commandant in Cilicia, left Adana immediately for

Beirut, leaving behind him only subordinate French officers to carry

out the evacuation. It threw the Armenians in Cilicia into a panic. In

preparing their independent Armenian State under the French aegis,

they had taken a drastic revenge on the Turks in Cilicia and there was

doubtless ample ground for their fears that the Turks would continue

the ugly business. In order to assuage their fears, the Turkish

Government proclaimed a blanket amnesty, exempted them from military

service which it had a legal right to claim from them, exempted them

from the forty percent requisitions which it exacted from all other

Turkish subjects in the country, and guaranteed their security in the

strongest terms it could use. To back up these guarantees, it

dispatched two of the best men it had available, Muheddin Pasha as

military governor of the re-occupied territory and Hamid Bey, who has

been mentioned above in connection with Samsun, as political officer.

Muheddin Pasha is a representative of the finest type of old Ottoman

Army officer. He was one of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s teachers in the War

Academy at Constantinople and he has been introduced by Kemal Pasha as

“the man who gave us all our ideas of liberty.” He had nothing to do

with the Armenian deportations of 1915 or with the Enver Government

which ordered them; under the Hamidian _regime_, he had been exiled

four times and twice condemned to death, and during the war he served

as Ottoman commander in the Yemen which was about as far from the

capital as Enver Pasha could have sent him.

The Turkish re-occupation was timed to begin Dec. 1, 1921, and to be

completed by Jan. 4, 1922. On November 20, Muheddin Pasha and Hamid

Bey published a proclamation in the Turkish newspaper, _Yeni Adana_,

which was designed to assuage the Armenians’ fears. On November 22,

they met a deputation of Armenian leaders in an upper room of the

Yenidje railway station, and M. Franklin-Bouillon reached Yenidje

later in the day from Angora to repeat their re-assurances. On

November 26, they motored to Mersina where some 40,000 Armenians were

waiting for ships and met a deputation of 100 Armenian notables in the

Government building. On November 29, M. Franklin-Bouillon returned to

Mersina alone and held a final conference with the Armenians. Since

they had once been Ottoman subjects, the Turkish Government had a

probable right in law to forbid their departure from Turkish soil, but

it had become clear that no guarantees it could offer would persuade

them to remain voluntarily and the Government refrained from keeping

them involuntarily. Most of them went to Syria to live on the charity

of the Near East Relief at Alexandretta, only a few miles away, and

their abandoned homes in Cilicia were put into the hands of a Turkish

committee appointed by Hamid Bey to be kept for them for a year’s

time. Most of Cilicia was in a devastated condition and there was an

appalling amount of work to be done in repairing the ravages of war,

but the bulk of the Armenians settled down to live in idleness on

American charity at the old Alexandretta barracks.

It may be that some means will yet be discovered of re-writing ten

centuries of history in the eastern provinces and five centuries in

Cilicia; it may be that some way will yet be opened of transferring

the semi-autonomy of the old _Ermeni_ community from a religious to a

territorial basis, but with all possible good will, the discovery of

it or of the faintest possibility of it has proven beyond the feeble

powers of the present writer. If the Armenian problem had ever been

really understood in the United States, certainly no sane American

would ever have meddled with it. The past, however, is beyond recall.

In the tragic position to which the Armenians have been reduced today,

three courses suggest themselves as being open to Americans in the

future:

First, Congress may declare war on Turkey and by dispatching an

expeditionary force of a strength of possibly 200,000 men, we may

conquer Cilicia and install an Armenian State which will stand as long

as our Army or some other Western Army remains in occupation and no

longer; and by so doing, we shall succeed in righting one wrong by

committing a greater wrong. Happily, this course is out of the

question.

Second, we may continue to support the Armenians with charity and to

insist upon “minority rights” in Turkey as distinct from the rights of

Turkey’s majorities. This course we have followed consistently since

1918, and it has only succeeded in stiffening the Turks, pauperizing

the Armenians, and preventing that peace which is the very first

essential of both.

Third, we may permit the Armenians to work out their future alone.

This is the course which thoughtful Armenians in Turkey now desire us

to adopt, and its principal remaining opponents are certain Armenians

who live in New York and are frightfully far from reality. If we adopt

this course for the future, it seems quite possible that those

Armenians who prefer to live in their own country will in time find

their way into Soviet Armenia and those who remain in Turkey will be

given equal rights and equal duties with the Turks themselves. Turks

and Armenians understand each other well. Until fifty years ago, they

had lived together on generally peaceful terms for several centuries

and the fact (to come no nearer home) that Czarist Russia has

disappeared, seems to promise the possibility of an eventual

resumption in the new Turkish State of that peace which once

characterized their relationship….

The French evacuation of Cilicia cleared the Turkish left, but the

Greeks on the Eski-Shehr-Afium line still confronted the Turkish

center and the Allies in Constantinople still confronted the Turkish

right. Meanwhile, the British command in the capital executed in a

lesser degree the same climb-down as the French had made with respect

to Angora. As a result of the Turkish victory on the Sakaria River,

the Turkish deportees on Malta were exchanged at Ineboli on the Black

Sea coast for British prisoners held in Anatolia. So Rauf Bey came

back to Angora.

No Turk has been a greater lover of the British than Rauf Bey (Rauf is

of Circassian and Albanian blood, but politically he is a Turk and

unlike most Turks his foreign language is English instead of French).

He had applied to the British Embassy in 1914 for help in keeping his

country neutral, but no reply had been given him. He had applied to

Admiral Calthorpe in 1918 for an armistice, but that armistice led to

the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Greek occupation of

Smyrna. He had acted in good faith upon an intimation from General

Milne in 1920 and had brought the Nationalist deputies from Angora to

Constantinople, but that action landed him behind British barbed wire

on Malta. Is it a matter of wonder that the great tradition which

generations of Englishmen had built up in Constantinople, has now

disappeared? No Turk has fought harder for the British than Rauf Bey,

and few countries have ever more consistently wounded their own

friends in Turkey than the England over which Mr. Lloyd George

presided. Rauf Bey’s tragic experience at the hands of their country

is one which Englishmen might do well to ponder during these new days,

when Turkish tugs are piloting British merchantmen into the Gulf of

Smyrna.

Ali Fethy Bey, a mild, almost shy, Macedonian Turk whose modest

bearing gives no hint of the strength he has contributed to Angora,

returned with Rauf and a long list of other deputies in the late

Parliament at Constantinople. Here were the civilian brains of which

Angora stood in the greatest need and it now became possible for the

Grand National Assembly to begin the erection of a civilian

administration. Winter was coming on and the military situation would

necessarily remain at a stand-still. The Assembly gave its War Office

(the Ministry of National Defense is its official title) an immediate

shake-up. Rafet Pasha fell and the Ministry of the Interior was

separated out and given to Ali Fethy Bey. Here he encountered the same

difficulty as so many of the Nationalist leaders encountered――he knew

nothing of Anatolia and it required most of the winter merely to learn

the ins and outs of his department. Rauf Bey was given the Ministry of

Public Works but in a re-shuffle of the Cabinet, he presently

displaced Fevzi Pasha as Prime Minister, a position more nearly

commensurate with his very high abilities. The Ministry of Finance was

elevated to an actual, as distinct from a figurehead, authority and

the Near East Relief’s representatives who had been accustomed to

consulting Rafet Pasha on matters of mutual interest, now found

themselves referred to Hassan Tahsin Bey, Minister of Finance, when

they desired to obtain exemption of relief supplies from the payment

of customs duties. Rafet Pasha had been accustomed to pass on their

applications as if they were personal matters, but Tahsin Bey was a

stranger. With the _regime_ of the Capitulations ended, Americans were

finding themselves in a position in which it became necessary to treat

a Government official in Turkey as though he were a Government

official. For some Americans, the change has proven, and is still

proving, a difficult one.

In the meantime, the Foreign Office which had been housed in the old

Public Debt building, had signed a treaty of mutual recognition with

Soviet Russia on March 16, 1921, at the same time as a similar

Russo-Persian treaty was being signed. In the Russo-Turkish treaty,

full Russian recognition was given to the Erzerum program, including

that clause of it respecting Constantinople and the Straits. No more

vivid illustration exists of the meaning of the Russian Revolution

than the contrast between the Russo-Turkish Treaty of 1921 and the

Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.

The application of the provisions of the 1921 Treaty to the new

Russo-Turkish frontier in the Kars Treaty which was signed Oct. 13,

1921, brought about peace in the eastern provinces, and Azerbaijan and

Afghan Ministers, accredited to Mustapha Kemal Pasha, were received in

Angora. A Russian Ambassador was also received and the elaboration of

consular and commercial treaties was begun.

Only three sections of the frontiers of the Turkish State now remained

to be fixed――the Mosul frontier, the Smyrna frontier and the frontier

in Europe. Communication with the West, with a view to the peaceful

settlement of these disputed frontiers, was now open to Constantinople

direct, the British command having opened the wire from the General

Post-Office in Stamboul to “the interior” at the same time as it

returned the deportees from Malta. The carriage road from Adabazar

which was available by rail from Constantinople, on past the Greek

left to Angora was also thrown open, but Greek and Circassian brigands

raided it so frequently that its use was impossible without a strong

guard. Access to Angora was in practice still confined to the railway

from Mersina to Konia and thence by carriage to Angora, or up from the

Black Sea coast through the mountains to Angora. Admission to the

interior, however, was rarely granted by the Turkish Government’s new

representative in Stamboul, for the Greeks were still dug in before

Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar and the war was still on.

Conditions in Anatolia greatly improved during the winter of 1921-’22.

The beginnings of a civilian administration appeared, but the military

situation necessarily continued to dominate. Fevzi Pasha continued to

snap up munitions wherever he could get them. Some came from the

Italians, some came from the French (it is not impossible that the

American uniforms in which some of the Turkish soldiers have been

clad, were originally left as American surplus stocks in France), and

some came from the British, for the British Commander-in-Chief and the

British High Commissioner in Constantinople were in as happy accord on

the subject of the Greeks as the British War Office and the British

Foreign Office have been on a number of other Eastern subjects. In the

main, however, the Turkish forces were re-mobilized and re-equipped by

the native resourcefulness of the Turk himself, as personified in the

dour towering figure of Fevzi Pasha. Even after he had secured foreign

ammunition, after gangs of peasant women had trekked it up from the

coasts in ox-carts and on the backs of mules and camels, machinery had

to be scraped together to change the _calibre_ of much of it before it

would fit his guns. There is hardly a more remarkable story in modern

military history than the story of how Fevzi Pasha re-mobilized and

re-equipped the Turkish forces out of left-over lots of dismantled

artillery and misfit ammunition. The cost of those forces to Anatolia

in its impoverished condition has been appalling, but their creation

by Fevzi Pasha under the conditions of siege which prevailed, has been

no less than miraculous.

XIX

SMYRNA, 1922

ALLIED EFFORTS TO HITCH THE SEVRES TREATY TO TURKISH NATIONALISM――GREEKS

TRANSFER TROOPS FROM SMYRNA TO EASTERN THRACE FOR A MOVE ON

CONSTANTINOPLE AND WHEN FETHY BEY IS REFUSED A HEARING IN LONDON,

FEVZI PASHA LAUNCHES HIS ATTACK――THE TURKISH RECOVERY OF SMYRNA――MR.

LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS AND THE OTTOMAN SULTAN FLEES――LAUSANNE.

Through the winter of 1921-’22, the Angora scene was a busy one. In

the little restaurant near the Assembly building, Cabinet Ministers,

deputies and Army officers crowded the pine tables at the luncheon

hour, glancing up from their small talk as the unpainted pine door

opened to admit others of their number. The Bokhara Mission would be

in tomorrow. Somebody had been newly named for the Mission to Kabul.

The Minister of the Interior was to make an important statement to the

Assembly shortly. From far away the staccato _rat-tat_ of machine-gun

practice knocked faintly at the ear without occasioning any more

interruption than the squeak of the passing ox-carts outside. But the

small talk paused in its flow when two young gentlemen of the

Azerbaijan Legation entered and joined three young ladies of the

Russian Embassy in a cigarette at their corner table. The small talk

recovered slowly. So-and-so Bey, newly arrived from the Ritz in Paris,

entered with the announcement that he had been unable to find a room

in the town and had had to borrow a soldier and a bucket of whitewash

to build himself a house. Could we come up to the housewarming

tomorrow night? We could. For somebody else with whom we had promised

to dine had had to cancel the invitation on further reflection, the

wind being in the wrong direction and his stove smoking in

consequence.

Outside the restaurant, the falling snow etched its white tracery

across the street panorama of Angora. Peasant women in red ragged

pantaloons, turbaned _hojas_ robed in more somber colors, smart

Turkish officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman days, Turkish

soldiers in somebody’s cast-off khaki, Government officials in

_kalpaks_ and European dress, a Turkish policeman in the old Ottoman

brilliance of red cuffs and brass buttons, six white-robed male nurses

from a Red Crescent hospital bearing on their shoulders a heavy

covered stretcher on its way to an empty grave outside the town――these

came and went through the veil of snow. Groups of men, sitting at

their coffee around glowing braziers in front of the cafes, lifted

their faces from the Constantinople papers at the approaching music of

a military band (true, the Constantinople papers were ten days old by

the time they reached Angora, but many of these men had left their

homes and families in Constantinople, and all they possessed in the

world was hidden somewhere in the old capital, awaiting their return).

Out of a narrow sidestreet the band moved into sight with a withered

little mad woman dancing in her rags beside it. She was fairly well

known in Angora. They said that her father and two brothers had been

killed in the Balkan Wars, her husband and three sons had been killed

in the Great War, and her youngest son had been killed at Inë-Onü. But

however these things might have been, she was dancing down the street

beside the heavy-shod bandsmen, dancing as lightly as the snowflakes

to the crashing rhythms of the Mustapha Kemal Pasha March.

In the wake of the band came the tramping shuffle of a long column of

soldiers, stolid men, heavily accoutred, with khaki _kalpaks_, their

rifles tipped with new bayonets. They marched away down the broad road

which led past the Assembly building to the railway station, a wooden

building with the single word “Angora” in Turkish and English script

on its sign-board. A low pall of woodsmoke, belched from the stacks of

half a dozen locomotives, hung over the railway yard. A long column of

ox-carts was discharging its cargo of new rope-handled wooden boxes

into freight cars. With the band playing, the column of soldiers broke

ranks and scrambled up into another freight train alongside the

station platform. They entrained within a half-hour, a rattle of

couplings ran along the length of the train, and it moved out of the

station toward the west, where the Greeks were still dug in before

Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar….

On Feb. 21, 1921, the Allied Governments had received delegations from

Athens, Constantinople and Angora in London in an effort to reconcile

the Treaty of Sevres and the new force of Turkish nationalism. The

Angora delegates were received as technically members of the

Constantinople delegation, but the latter delegated its leadership to

Bekr Sami Bey, a huge sloping Circassian who was Foreign Minister at

Angora. Bekr Sami Bey belongs to a type of leadership which is one of

Turkey’s peculiar assets, a type which has enjoyed a long and rich

experience in diplomacy and which as a result has developed a genius

for stripping away non-essentials and holding fast to essentials.

There is an old and true saying to the effect that what an Englishman

is at sea, what a Frenchman is on land, a Turk is in diplomacy. It is

a statement which closely characterizes men of the type of Bekr Sami

Bey.

The Allied Governments offered to institute an international

commission for the investigation of population statistics in Eastern

Thrace and Smyrna, on condition that Turkey and Greece accepted its

findings and that the remainder of the Sevres Treaty stood unaltered.

Bekr Sami Bey accepted the offer, subject to certain conditions in the

conduct of the investigation and certain reservations as to the

remainder of the Sevres Treaty. The Greek delegation would accept no

alteration in the Sevres Treaty of any sort.

On March 12, the Allied Governments proposed a series of modifications

in the Sevres Treaty, undertaking _inter alia_ that “the region called

the _Vilayet_ of Smyrna would remain under Turkish sovereignty and a

Greek force would remain in Smyrna town, but in the rest of the

_sanjak_ order would be maintained by a _gendarmerie_ with Allied

officers and recruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution

of the population as reported by an Inter-Allied Commission. The same

proportional arrangement, equally according to the report of the

Commission, would apply to the administration. A Christian governor

would be appointed by the League of Nations and assisted by an

elective assembly and an elective council. The governor would be

responsible for payments to the Turkish Government of annual sums

expanding with the prosperity of the province. This arrangement would

in five years be open to review on the demand of either party by the

League of Nations.” This pleased neither Greeks nor Turks and the 1921

Greek offensive put a speedy end to its consideration.

On June 21, the Allied Governments offered Greece their intervention,

but the Royalist command behind Smyrna was preparing to resume its

march toward Angora and intervention was refused.

In March, 1922, the Allied Governments summoned delegations from

Athens, Constantinople and Angora, the Angora delegation headed by

Yusuf Kemal Bey who had succeeded Bekr Sami Bey as Foreign Minister.

On March 22, an Allied proposal for an armistice in Asia Minor was

forwarded to Athens and Angora, and was followed on March 26 by an

Allied Note making further modifications in the Sevres Treaty and

proposing “the peaceful evacuation of Asia Minor by the Greek forces

and the restitution of Turkish sovereignty over the whole of that

region” within a period of four months after the armistice. The Greek

Government accepted the proposal, but Yusuf Kemal Bey on April 7

stipulated that in his Government’s view an armistice could only be

agreed to after the Greek evacuation. The Allied Governments replied

on April 15 that the period of the Greek evacuation would be shortened

but that it was conditional on a prior armistice. On April 22, Yusuf

Kemal Bey offered to meet Allied delegates at Ismid in an effort to

explore further peace conditions which the acceptance of the armistice

proposal would impose on his Government, conditions which had been

left “open to discussion” in the Allied Note of April 15. The Ismid

proposal came to nothing and in June, Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the

Interior at Angora, was dispatched to Paris and London with the object

of discovering the nature of the peace conditions which had not yet

been defined by the Allies and effecting an agreement if possible.

On July 22, the Royalist Greek command transferred 20,000 Old Greek

troops from its lines behind Smyrna to the Chatalja lines in Eastern

Thrace for a move on Constantinople itself, a move which the Allied

Governments vetoed. It replaced them behind Smyrna with raw Anatolian

Greek levies and on July 30, “autonomy under the guarantee of the

Greek Army” was proclaimed upon “Ionia.” This radically changed the

military situation, but Fevzi Pasha who was now ready at Angora, was

ordered by his Government to withhold action pending news from Fethy

Bey. In Paris, Fethy Bey had been well received but when he crossed to

London late in July, Lord Curzon’s engagement with him was cancelled

and it was only after protests were made on his behalf that Sir

William Tyrrell of the Foreign Office received him. Sir William,

however, was not empowered to discuss terms of peace and on August 11,

Fethy Bey left London for Rome, stopping in Paris long enough to wire

the news of his reception in London to Angora. The solution of the

Smyrna deadlock was now committed to Fevzi Pasha.

At dawn on August 26, Ismet Pasha attacked the Greek position before

Afium-Karahissar. The secrecy which had marked the re-mobilization and

re-equipment of the Turkish Armies throughout, had been maintained to

the last and Ismet Pasha found the Greeks wholly unprepared. They

abandoned Afium and Kutahia and endeavored to stand on September 1

before Ushak, but on September 2, Turkish cavalry drove into Ushak

through and over the Greeks, swept up General Tricoupis and his entire

staff, and escaped to their own lines. The rest was easy. The distance

from Ushak to Smyrna is 160 miles, but the Greeks covered it in eight

days, abandoning everything but their rifles, living off the country

and stopping only long enough to wreak their last revenge on the

villages through which they fled. On September 5, they began streaming

into Smyrna and nothing speaks more highly of Fevzi Pasha’s staff work

than the fact that all branches of his Army succeeded in keeping pace

with them. On September 9, advance Turkish units entered Smyrna.

Meanwhile, a secondary attack in the north had been launched against

Biledjik on August 30, the Greeks evacuated Eski-Shehr on September 2

and by September 12, their stragglers were crossing from Mudania and

Panderma to Eastern Thrace.

From the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States,

the Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna shook the world. Islam which had

been staggered by the Greek occupation in 1919, threw itself into

rejoicing with “our brother Turk.” Christendom which had passed over

the Greek occupation in silence, was as staggered by the Turkish

re-occupation as if one of the Commandments had dropped out of the

Decalogue. Of the three elements which were present in Smyrna,

Armenians, Greeks and Turks (to mention them in alphabetical order),

American churchmen assumed that it was the Turks who started the fire

which razed part of Smyrna town within a week after the re-occupation.

As for the Turks themselves, budding Turkish linguists greeted the

news from Smyrna with shouts of “Finish _imperialisme_!”

Only the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the

Greek occupation of Eastern Thrace in the Allied rear, now confronted

Fevzi Pasha. On September 16, Mr. Lloyd George issued his call to the

British Dominions to rally to the defense of “the freedom of the

Straits.” Doubtless Mr. Lloyd George knew what he meant by the phrase,

but while Soviet Russia and Turkey had repeatedly and publicly defined

it, Mr. Lloyd George had refrained from any public definition of it.

More was involved, however, than “the freedom of the Straits” in the

manifesto of September 16. That manifesto was a direct descendant of

the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir

Alim in exile, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with

Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, with the Greek _fait

accompli_ across the Straits in process of collapse, the now exposed

British command of the Straits and the Black Sea was all that remained

of the vast territories which the collapse of Czarist Russia had

vacated before an aggressive British imperialism.

On September 30, Mr. Lloyd George sent General Harington, Allied

Commander-in-Chief in Constantinople, a six-hour ultimatum ordering

the Turkish forces to withdraw from contact with the British lines

behind Chanak. If that ultimatum had been served, it would have

precipitated an Anglo-Turkish war and with British reinforcements

already streaming to the Straits, it is difficult to see with what

other purpose it could have been dispatched from London. Instead of

serving it, however, General Harington dropped it into his pocket and

went to Mudania on October 3 with his Allied colleagues to negotiate

an armistice with Ismet Pasha. At dawn on October 11, the Mudania

armistice was signed, the Allies agreeing to evacuate the Greeks from

Eastern Thrace immediately and to return it to Turkey up to the

Maritza River, admitting the Turkish civil administration, supported

by a force of 8,000 _gendarmes_, within a period of thirty days after

the Greek evacuation.

On October 19, Mr. Lloyd George who might have written the Mudania

armistice in ink instead of in blood, handed his resignation to the

King. In Mr. Bonar Law’s Government, however, Lord Curzon remained at

the Foreign Office. Preparations were now made for a peace conference,

beginning at Lausanne on November 13, for the winding up of

hostilities between the Allies and Turkey and between Turkey and

Greece. Invitations were issued to, among others, the old Ottoman

Government in Constantinople to send delegates to the conference. That

Government, from the Sultan-Caliph down, had been stripped of actual

authority long before by the Allied occupation of the old capital, and

the Grand National Assembly speedily put an end to its technical

existence. On November 1, the Assembly reiterated its previous

declaration that “the form of government based on personal sovereignty

in Constantinople” had ceased to exist on March 16, 1920, adding that

“the Caliphate belongs to the Ottoman dynasty and the Grand National

Assembly will nominate him of the dynasty who is the most upright and

wise in knowledge and character. The Turkish nation is the supporting

power of the Caliphate.”

On the morning of November 4, the Constantinople Cabinet handed in its

resignation to the Caliph-Sultan and at noon Rafet Pasha took over the

administration of Constantinople as one of the provincial capitals of

the new Turkish State. In the early hours of November 17, the

Caliph-Sultan fled on a British battleship to Malta and on the

following day the Grand National Assembly at Angora elected the heir

presumptive, Abdul Medjid Effendi, to the Caliphate of Islam. Turkish

nationalism was continuing to surmount that Old Turkish conservatism

which had helped to wreck the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. As for

Islam in India, such was the siege-encircled secrecy in which Turkish

nationalism had developed that the end of its historic Ottoman

theocracy fell upon it as a severe blow, but it stuck loyally to “our

brother Turk.” As for the Emperor of India, he was uncertain whether

the seat of the Caliphate was Constantinople or Mecca. The ex-_Sherif_

Hussein had two sons perched on precarious thrones, Feisal at Bagdad

and Abdullah at Amman, and had himself been referred to as “Supreme

Pontiff of the Islamic world and temporal ruler of Arabia.”

[Illustration: GENERAL MOUHEDDIN PASHA

Military Governor of Cilicia on re-occupation by Turkish forces in

January, 1922.]

[Illustration: MEHMED EMIN BEY

The Poet of New Turkey.]

On November 20, Lord Curzon finally opened the peace conference at

Lausanne, with Ismet Pasha, now Foreign Minister in the Turkish

Government, heading the only Turkish delegation. Negotiations went

forward until Jan. 31, 1923, when Lord Curzon served a draft treaty on

Ismet Pasha and on the night of February 4 abruptly left for London.

This breach in the negotiations left British military and naval forces

in occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek Army

facing east along the Maritza; but the snows of the Balkans melted

without incident. On April 23, Sir Horace Rumbold, British High

Commissioner in Constantinople, took Lord Curzon’s place at the

resumed conference and the Treaty of Peace, together with a number of

subsidiary documents, was finally signed at Lausanne on July 24.

We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions

which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead,

with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost,

with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate

project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr.

Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility

toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he

attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet

Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in

1922 it refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to

Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions

continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek

_fait accompli_ across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the

Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice

returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the

Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British

acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought

to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish

delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907

Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits

Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he

dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been

designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off

all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived

on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come

when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both

Turkey and Russia.

The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at

Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace

and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of

search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage

when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war,

both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions,

one of which is that the “maximum force which any one Power may send

through the Straits into the Black Sea is not to be greater than that

of the most powerful fleet of the littoral Powers of the Black Sea

existing in that sea at the time of passage; but with the proviso that

the Powers reserve to themselves the right to send into the Black Sea,

at all times and under all circumstances, a force of not more than

three ships, of which no individual ship shall exceed 10,000 tons.”

By this Convention, Lord Curzon retains access to the southern and

Trans-Caucasian ports of Soviet Russia. Ismet Pasha signed it in the

course of the general signature at Lausanne on July 24. Soviet Russia

signed it at Rome on August 14. Early in September, Mr. Amery, First

Lord of the British Admiralty, paid a visit of inspection to Malta

where he announced that for the next year or two the principal British

squadron would remain in the Mediterranean, and from Malta he

continued to Constantinople.

Lord Curzon also succeeded at Lausanne in securing agreement that “the

frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly

arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within

nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the

two Governments in the time mentioned, the dispute shall be referred

to the Council of the League of Nations.” The Turco-Arab split in

_Sunni Islam_ which the Foreign Office engineered in 1915 through the

Residency in Cairo, still lives in the Mosul controversy. Arab

autonomy under the religious suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliph which

Rauf Bey had stipulated to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros in 1918, still

awaits, _inter alia_, the fate of Mosul.

The rest of the Lausanne Conference was a rout. The military victory

which Ismet Pasha had won over the Greeks at Smyrna, he duplicated as

a diplomatic victory over the Allies at Lausanne. Having salvaged the

Straits Convention from the wreck and having postponed the Mosul

matter, Lord Curzon abandoned the unhappy scene on Feb. 4, 1923,

leaving Sir Horace Rumbold to save what he could when the conference

resumed on April 23. Ismet Pasha restricted himself as far as possible

to a settlement of the political terms of peace, referring

concessionaires to his Government at Angora, but it was not until July

17 that Sir Horace consented to sign peace without the Turkish

Government’s acquiescence in the claim of the so-called Turkish

Petroleum Company upon the oil of the Mosul province. Excepting for

further negotiation over Mosul, the political terms of peace between

the Allies and Turkey were signed at Lausanne on July 24. Several of

the economic issues of the peace, the most important of which is the

question of the currency in which Turkey is to pay interest on its

share of the Old Ottoman Public Debt, are still in process of

negotiation.

On August 4, terms for the resumption of diplomatic relations between

the United States and Turkey were signed at Lausanne. Relations had

been severed on April 20, 1917, by the Enver Government at

Constantinople and on May 5, 1923, Ismet Pasha had written Joseph C.

Grew, American Minister to Switzerland, proposing negotiations looking

toward the resumption of regular relations. Two Turco-American

Treaties resulted, one a general treaty and the other an extradition

treaty, the former recording American acquiescence in the abrogation

of the Capitulations which Ismet Pasha had imposed upon the Allies.

Under this treaty, Americans and American institutions in Turkey are

hereafter to be subject to Turkish law and Turkish taxes, Turkey

having voluntarily agreed during negotiations with the Allies to

appoint four legal advisers, nationals of countries neutral in the

late war, who are to serve for a term of five years and whose function

is to be rigorously restricted to the offering of advice. By this

abrogation of the Capitulations, Turkey enters into a status of

equality in the family of nations. In July, 1894, Buddhist Japan began

a five-year probationary period preparatory to its acquisition of that

status of equality which previously been the exclusive right of the

Christian nations, but in July, 1923, its Treaty of Peace with the

Allies conferred upon Moslem Turkey a status of immediate equality

with the Christian nations and Japan.

Ratification of the two Turco-American Treaties is to be exchanged at

Constantinople “as soon as possible” and the Treaties are to take

effect two months after ratification, the intervening period being

allowed for the evacuation of the American naval forces from Turkish

waters.

Meanwhile, Greco-Turkish agreements signed at Lausanne on Jan. 30,

1923, had preceded Greek participation in the Allied Peace Treaty of

July 24. On January 30, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their

Moslem and Orthodox nationals, respectively, amounting to a total of

possibly 500,000 persons, exception being made for Moslems of Western

Thrace and Orthodox of Constantinople, Turkey permitting the

Oecumenical Patriarchate to remain at the Phanar in Stamboul subject

to its disestablishment and to the departure of Meletios IV, the then

Patriarch. With this precedent agreement, Greece recognized in the

Peace Treaty of July 24 “her obligation to make reparation for the

damage caused in Anatolia by the acts of the Greek Army or

administration which were contrary to the laws of war. On the other

hand, Turkey, in consideration of the financial situation of Greece

resulting from the prolongation of the war and from its consequences,

finally renounces all claims for reparation against the Greek

Government.” In lieu of reparation, Turkey accepted the suburb of

Karagatch across the Maritza from Adrianople, which was surrendered by

the Greek Army on September 15 in as wrecked a condition as the towns

from which the Greek Army had fled in Anatolia a year before.

On August 23 the Grand National Assembly at Angora ratified the Peace

Treaty of Lausanne by a vote of 215 to 20, and on the following day

the Allied evacuation of Constantinople and the Straits began, to be

completed within a period of six weeks….

To realize the meaning of the Treaty of Lausanne, we shall have to go

back some distance into Ottoman history. Sultan Selim III who was

deposed in 1808, was possibly the first of the Ottoman reformers.

Mahmoud II who succeeded him, was another great Sultan who saw the

need of introducing Western methods into his Eastern realm, and it was

he who abolished the Janissaries in 1826 as a result of their long

opposition to reform. Abdul Medjid I was a third great reformer who

proclaimed the Tanzimat in 1839 under whose terms all Ottoman subjects

were to be given an equal status in temporal law. The Tanzimat dealt

with sweeping reforms in education, in methods of tax collection and

in the courts, but Czarist Russia put a stop to Ottoman reform in the

aggression of 1853 which resulted in the Crimean War.

Under Abdul Aziz, a Western-trained group of Turks revived Ottoman

reform and when Abdul Hamid II became Sultan, Midhat Pasha succeeded

in proclaiming a Constitution. Again Czarist Russia put a stop to

reform in the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 and the Berlin Congress

adopted the title of “the Sick man of Europe” which the Czar had

invented for the Sultan. Czarist Russia and Western Europe now took

over the problem of Ottoman reform themselves, directing it to the

benefit of the Sultan’s Bulgarian and Armenian subjects while passing

over the equally urgent needs of his Turkish subjects. Ottoman reform

as thus directed now became the fixed objective of Christendom from

Czarist Russia to the country towns of the United States, while Islam

in time from the Balkans to the back hills of Java became increasingly

anxious over “our brother Turk.”

Alarmed by the dividing effect of Ottoman reform in Western hands, the

Western-trained Young Turks again revived their own program of reform

and when Sir Edward Grey agreed with Czarist Russia in 1907 on the

eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks hurriedly

revived Midhat Pasha’s Constitution in the Revolution of 1908. But the

end was already at hand. Austria-Hungary immediately annexed Bosnia

and Herzegovina. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence. Insurrections

began in Albania in which Austria-Hungary was not disinterested and in

Kurdistan in which Czarist Russia was not disinterested. The Italians

landed in Tripoli and the First Balkan War brought the Bulgarians to

the Chatalja lines behind Constantinople, putting an end not only to

any attempt at Young Turkish reform but almost to the existence of the

Empire. In the Western view, this sort of thing constituted Ottoman

reform, and in 1914 the Anglo-Russian combination closed on the Empire

and reformed it out of existence. The Sevres Treaty in 1920 finally

wrote the last chapter in the story of Western reform by proposing to

hand over the richest provinces of the Turkish country to Greeks and

Armenians while denying the Turks any right whatever to an independent

existence. The Sevres Treaty was and still is a full and complete

definition of the word “reform” when applied by Allied diplomacy to

Turkish lands.

In the meantime, the Young Turks abrogated the Capitulations in 1914

and with their hands untied for the first time in their modern

history, a number of other reforms followed in rapid succession

despite the fact that they were engaged in a world war. When Rauf Bey

met Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros to apply for an armistice in 1918, he

stipulated that the abrogation of the Capitulations would have to be

recognized, but the first act of the Allies upon occupying

Constantinople was to re-impose the Capitulations and to undo every

reform which the Young Turks had succeeded in making. Within a few

months, the Greek occupation of Smyrna threw the Young Turks into the

heart of Anatolia. Turkish nationalism repeated and amplified Rauf

Bey’s stipulations at Mudros in the Erzerum program of 1919. The

Ottoman Parliament committed itself to the Erzerum program early in

1920 under the name of the National Pact. British officers reformed

the Ottoman Parliament out of existence on the night of March 15-16,

1920, but away in the heart of Anatolia Turkish nationalism possessed

as free a hand for its own program of reform as its state of siege

permitted. What the Sevres Treaty was to Western reform in Turkey, the

Grand National Assembly became to Turkish reform in Turkey; and when

Soviet Russia recognized the National Pact in 1921, the fingers which

had long strangled Ottoman reform were removed, temporarily at least,

from the Turkish throat.

Afghanistan quickly recognized the Pact. The three Soviet Republics of

Trans-Caucasia recognized it. Insofar as it concerned Cilicia, France

recognized it. Soviet Ukrainia recognized it early in 1922. Insofar as

it concerned Eastern Thrace, Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign

Secretary recognized it at the point of the bayonet in the Mudania

armistice. But at Lausanne, Ismet Pasha placed the rest of the Pact

before Lord Curzon and early in 1923 Lord Curzon, having swallowed a

few drops of the nasty stuff, returned to London. There seemed then to

be as little chance of Ismet Pasha’s diplomatic success as there had

once seemed to be of Fevzi Pasha’s military success, but Turkish

reform would not be alive today if it had not learned long ago to

achieve the impossible. Little by little, Ismet Pasha dropped away the

non-essentials of the Pact while holding fast to the abrogation of the

Capitulations which the Enver Government had decreed on Sept. 28,

1914, and on July 24, 1923, the British Foreign Office finally

accorded its recognition to the essentials of the National Pact,

exception being made for further negotiation over Mosul.

For the last century, the Ottoman Empire has sought justice at the

hands of Czarist Russia and the West. Czarist Russia has finally

ceased to exist and Turkey has finally gained justice from the West at

the point of the bayonet, a fact which we Christians of the West might

do well to ponder. It secured from the West at Lausanne a belated

recognition of its right to control its own reforms in its own country

and since Czarist Russia and the West by their long endeavor to impose

reforms from without for the exclusive benefit of the Turk’s

minorities, have made it impossible for the Turk and his minorities to

live together, the Turk today has only himself to consider in Turkey.

Insofar as no further Western attempts are made to strangle Turkish

reform (and if the past is any clew to the future, such attempts are

quite certain to be made), the future of Turkey now depends on the

Turk. We know at last who is responsible in Turkey, and this is a very

substantial gain.

XX

THE REAL PROBLEM OF TURKISH NATIONALISM

ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW TURKISH STATE――MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA

OPENS THE SMYRNA CONGRESS――THE CHESTER CONCESSION A STEP FROM

IMPERIALISM TO LAW.

As soon as the Erzerum program had been definitely committed to

negotiation at Lausanne, Mustapha Kemal Pasha lost no time in

diverting into the ways of peace the energy with which Turkish

nationalism had re-mobilized and re-equipped its Armies. For the

building up of a new and Western economic tradition with which to

supplement the old and Eastern military tradition which had long

distinguished its nation, the new Turkish Government had laid its

foundations well. It had refrained from the issue of paper money,

confining itself to the use of paper issued by the old Ottoman

Government during the war. As fast as this paper became worn out, it

was sent to the headquarters of the Public Debt administration in

Constantinople to be exchanged for clean paper. Unlike a number of

post-war European Governments, it had refrained from financing itself

by the use of the printing press but the merit of this achievement is

of course lessened by the primitive nature of the country which it

governed. A country which could survive forty percent requisitions

hardly needed to use the printing press. If many of its minor

officials and soldiers never saw a pay-day, it was not money which had

drawn them into the bitter loneliness of Angora. The deputies in the

Assembly were paid out of the _Evkaf_ (Moslem religious endowments) in

their constituencies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha himself was paid £T300 a

month, a salary which in its buying power in Asia Minor today, is

equivalent to about £T75, or $375, pre-war. The cost of living has

gone up severely in Asia Minor but not quite as severely as it has in

the West. A camel which before the war could have been bought for £T25

gold, will now cost about £T100 paper.

Gold has completely disappeared from circulation, most of it drained

away to Germany during the war. There is a little nickel in

circulation, but practically all transactions in Asia Minor, however

small, are conducted in paper. By the time the Battle of the Sakaria

River was fought and won, the Government had collected a gold reserve

which amounted to about £T1,000,000 (say $5,000,000) in Ottoman and

other gold coins and about 200 kilos of bar gold. Its trade had been

destroyed, its population had been broken, it was confronted with

great devastated areas in the “Pontus,” in Cilicia, in the eastern

provinces and behind Smyrna. Its financial position was about as low

as can be imagined, but it must be emphasized that low as its

financial position was, it was sound. The foundation was good, and the

only question pertaining to it was the durability of the economic

structure which the Turk would prove himself able to build upon it.

The abrogation of the Capitulations on Sept. 28, 1914, had turned the

customs traiff over to the Government and when Angora inherited the

burden of debt and undevelopment which had borne Constantinople down,

the customs tariff was increased from five to fifteen times over the

old Capitulatory tariff. This was done primarily for protective

purposes. Insofar as the war permitted, the development of home

industries was to be given every possible stimulus. Even down to such

minor industries as the manufacture of men’s headwear, nationalist

solicitude for home industries was quickly shown. Presumably one

reason why the lamb-skin _kalpak_ has been substituted in the new

Turkey for the old Ottoman _fez_, is the fact that _fezzes_ were

manufactured in Austria. Although it deprived the Government of a

revenue which was said to amount to £T4,000,000 a year at a time when

it needed every _piaster_ it could lay its hands on, country-wide

prohibition was voted soon after the Grand National Assembly was

convened at Angora.

Since Asia Minor is in large part an agricultural area, the

Government’s first economic plans were directed toward the development

of agriculture, and a scheme was evolved under which farm machinery

was to be purchased abroad by a Government company and distributed

through the branches of the Government’s Agricultural Bank. This

scheme may or may not materialize as the Government enters more fully

into foreign commercial relationships, but its spirit is highly

significant. Trade has passed definitely into the hands of the Turks

and in the building up of an economic tradition to which the Turks

have heretofore been strangers, Turkish nationalism confronts its real

problem.

On Feb. 17, 1923, Mustapha Kemal Pasha opened the country’s first

economic congress at Smyrna. More than 500 delegates were present.

Farmers and producers were given the center block of seats, traders

and business men the right block, and skilled workmen the left block,

with a special section of the hall given over to an exhibition of

agricultural machinery, most of it from the United States. It was a

unique event in Turkish history, and its significance may be gathered

from Kemal Pasha’s opening address, which merits quotation in part:

“Gentlemen, when history applies itself to searching the causes of the

grandeur and of the decadence of a people, it invokes political,

military and social reasons. It is evident that ultimately all the

reasons spring from social conditions but that which is in closest

bearing to the existence, the prosperity and the decadence of a people

is its economics. This historical truth is confirmed in our existence

and our national history. In fact, if one examines the history of the

Turkish people, one will see that her grandeur and her decadence are

merely corollaries of her economic life. So in order to raise the new

Turkey to the desired level, it is necessary, cost what it may, to

accord all our solicitude to the questions which concern her

economics.

“In the course of Ottoman history, all the efforts employed, all the

activities of her statesmen, have had as their aim, not to satisfy the

desires of the people nor to realize their aspirations, but rather to

appease petty yearnings and personal ambitions. Comrades, if one

examines closely the reigns of Mohammed II, of Selim and of Suleiman,

one finds that these great and powerful monarchs based their foreign

policy on their desires to satiate their personal leanings and

ambitions. They had thus to regulate their internal organization in

accordance with their foreign policy. Now foreign policy ought to be,

on the contrary, subordinated to the internal organization――that is to

say, foreign policy should be dominated by the internal economic

situation.”

Kemal Pasha went on to explain that the monarchical policy of

subordinating internal organization to foreign policy, had led to the

necessity of allowing conquered elements to retain their national

organizations in which they devoted themselves peacefully to economic

pursuits while the “essential element” protected them, wielding the

sword against their enemies on every frontier of the Empire.

“Gentlemen, those who effect conquests by the sword finish by being

beaten by those who employ as their arm the plow, and by ceding their

place to them. In the struggle between the sword and the plow, it is

always the plow which comes out on top.”

As soon as Rauf Bey returned from Malta, he was given the Ministry of

Public Works at Angora, where the elaboration of a scheme of railway

development was given immediate attention. Negotiations ensued with

the representatives of the Ottoman-American Development Company,

backed by Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, U. S. N. (retired), who had

been in previous negotiation with the old Ottoman Government in

Constantinople. On April 11, 1923, the development scheme which the

Government had formulated, was made over to the Ottoman-American

Company by the Grand National Assembly and on April 30, the Minister

of Public Works signed a convention with two representatives of the

Company for what has long been famous as the Chester Concession.

This Turkish program falls into three parts――the construction of 2,714

miles of new railway line, the construction of a new capital city at

Angora and of ports at Samsun, Yamurtalik and Trebizond together with

the re-construction of towns and villages wrecked by the Greeks, and

the exploitation of mineral rights within twenty-_kilometer_ zones on

each side of the new railway lines. The convention with the Chester

group runs for a term of ninety-nine years unless the Turkish

Government chooses to exercise its right of purchase after thirty

years. The Turkish company which is to operate the new railway lines

is to pay thirty percent of its profits to the Government and is to be

subject to all Turkish taxation except customs duties on its

construction materials and its coal, the latter of which is to be

exempt for a period of ten years only. The company may employ foreign

experts (the original Chester project of 1909 stipulated that they

were to wear the _fez_ and a Government uniform), but Turks are to be

trained to take their places and the labor gangs are to be purely

Turkish. There is no _kilometric_ guarantee, nor does the Concession

add any financial burden to the burdens which the Turkish Government

already bears, until such time as the Government may decide to take

over the lines.

The backbone of this Turkish program is its railway scheme, and in

this respect it differs widely from the original Chester project of

1909. Czarist Russia having disappeared, the Turkish Government now

revives the central Anatolian scheme which was first suggested for the

Bagdad Railway and vetoed by Russia. It proposes to extend the

Eski-Shehr-Angora line which was orginally intended for the main line

of the Bagdad Railway, to Sivas, Kharput, Diarbekr and Mosul, but it

adapts its railway program to the needs which have developed during

the last four years. It may be assumed that military considerations

have played a part in the framing of the Government’s railway scheme,

for the war in Europe is not yet ended, and nobody knows how long a

breathing space Turkey is to be permitted.

The first line to be built is to be the Yamurtalik-Kharput-Bitlis

line, with a branch dropping to Mosul, Kirkuk and Suleimanieh. If and

when this line is completed, it will strengthen the Syrian and

Mesopotamian frontiers, and its western end, terminating in an

excellent harbor at Yamurtalik on the Turkish side of Alexandretta

Bay, will afford the Government a port which it sorely needs on the

Mediterranean.

The second line to be built is to be the Angora-Erzerum line with

branches dropping to Samsun and Trebizond on the Black Sea. At present

the Government has no access by rail to any of its Black Sea ports.

Possibly if it had had speedy access to the “Pontus” provinces, they

would not have been devastated by irregular warfare during these last

four years.

The final lines to be built are embodied in a group by which the

Angora-Sivas line is to be connected _via_ Caesarea with Ulu Kishla on

the Bagdad Railway, and the Erzerum line is to be extended to Bayazid

on the Persian frontier. The Erzerum and Bayazid lines in the eastern

provinces are of obvious bearing on any future Russian attempt to

repeat the great invasion of 1915-’16. They are of more meaning than

that. At present Soviet Russia and Turkey are at peace with each

other, and if and when the railway program which the Turkish

Government has made over to the Chester group is completed, Russia may

be afforded an overland outlet to the Mediterranean at Yamurtalik. The

Russian and Turkish gauges differ, the former being 5 feet and the

latter 4 feet 8½ inches, but the political possibilities in affording

Soviet Russia peacefully what Czarist Russia sought by force, are

incalculable. Peaceful access to the Mediterranean over the Chester

lines might easily reduce the Straits to a very small factor in

Russia’s foreign policy. While Turkey is not a Socialist State and

presumably will not be, Russo-Turkish peace is the very foundation of

any world peace and if the Chester group is able to contribute

effectively to an enduring Russo-Turkish peace, it will perform a

service of incalculable worth to the cause of world peace.

A month after the grant of the Chester Concession, Allied

concessionaires began filtering into Angora from Constantinople, to

begin economic negotiations with the Turkish Government simultaneously

with the political negotiations which were dragging toward an end at

Lausanne. These economic negotiations comprised four subjects: (1) the

status of pre-war concessions; (2) the status of modifications

authorized by the Ottoman Government after the Mudros armistice; (3)

compensation for war damage to the property of concessionaires; and

(4) the extension of concessions for a period equal to that in which

they had been non-operative during the war. By the middle of June, the

Constantinople Telephone Company (British) had reached agreement with

the Turkish Government. Early in July, similar agreements had been

reached by the Smyrna-Aidin Railway (British) and the Mudania-Brussa

Railway (French).

Meanwhile, the Assembly adjourned for new elections. Peace not yet

having been signed at Lausanne, the Nationalist Party went to the

country on the basis of the National Pact and was returned by an

overwhelming majority. It was a war election, somewhat reminiscent of

Mr. Lloyd George’s “khaki election” of 1918, and party government with

a strong Opposition in the Assembly is hardly to be expected at Angora

until after an assured peace has come to Turkey.

The Second Assembly was convened in the gray granite building at the

foot of Angora on August 11 and Mustapha Kemal Pasha was re-elected

President by 196 of the 197 deputies who had reached the capital.

Presumably the lone dissenting vote was the vote of “the Pasha”

himself. Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior, was elected Prime

Minister in place of Rauf Bey and most of the remaining Ministers were

re-elected, Ismet Pasha retaining the portfolio of Foreign Affairs and

Fevzi Pasha remaining Chief of the General Staff. The Treaty of

Lausanne having been ratified on August 23, the Assembly lost no time

in approaching the urgent problem of its own economy and on September

5 Fethy Bey announced the main lines of the Government’s policy. He

stressed first the problem of finance and the necessity of readjusting

taxation. Further points on which the Government proposed to

concentrate, he said, were the schools system and the _gendarmerie_.

His speech was noteworthy for the brevity of its references to foreign

affairs. Given peace abroad, the Government’s program as enunciated by

Fethy Bey is an internal program.

XXI

THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

With the rebirth of Turkey, this narrative approaches its end. With

the coming of a probable peace, the passions which have been raised in

the Near and Middle East need sorely to be allayed, and there would be

small usefulness in this narrative of the destruction they have

worked, if the past did not contain its element of useful guidance for

the future.

We in the West are heavily in debt to England. It is England which has

slowly and laboriously fashioned our Western tradition of democratic

government and that tradition has placed us all incalculably in

England’s debt. That tradition is still evolving and England is still,

as it has always been, the scene of its evolution. But in

acknowledging our debt to England, we need to think clearly, to

distinguish sharply between the British democracy and the British

Foreign Office. Between the two, there is no effective connection. The

Foreign Office is outside the British Constitution and is not subject

to the effective control of the British Parliament. British foreign

policy in the Near and Middle East neither originates in Parliament

nor is controlled by Parliament. This is a state of things which has

been at once a source of enormous strength to British diplomacy and a

source of enormous danger to world peace.

It was through the British Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey’s

Secretaryship, that the British democracy was tied to Czarist Russia

in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The British democracy did not

know it at the time nor does it realize to this day the meaning of the

1907 Treaty, for its Foreign Office has been as blinkers fastened

about its eyes. There came a time in 1914 when Czarist Russia clashed

with Germany over the control of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.

Sir Edward Grey had tied the British democracy to Czarist Russia and

in 1914 it remained so tied. Whether Sir Edward Grey permitted his

country to believe that the war was to be fought over Belgium and

under this impression brought his country into the war, is a question

which the British democracy may some day succeed in settling with its

own Foreign Office. Events, however, would appear to indicate that

Basra was more intimately connected with the Foreign Office’s actual

war aims than Belgium was. Three weeks before the Enver Government at

Constantinople entered the war, a British Indian brigade lay off

Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf and when German naval officers

hustled the Enver Government into the war by bombarding Odessa, events

played straight into the Foreign Office’s hand. The brigade off

Bahrein struck at Basra instantly and Sir Edward Grey, in conjunction

with Czarist Russia, began that partitioning of the Ottoman Empire

which had been envisaged in 1907. Czarist Russia was to receive

Constantinople and the eastern provinces, the Foreign Office was to

achieve its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme, and the Ottoman

Caliphate of Islam was to be destroyed. But of all this the British

democracy knew little until Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and

Soviet Russia published the secret treaties which it discovered in the

Czarist archives at Petrograd.

Deprived of its Czarist accomplice at the very peak of its history,

deprived even of the tame Kerensky _regime_, the British Foreign

Office in 1919 sought American aid in holding its position. Viscount

Grey of Fallodon was dispatched to Washington and American churchmen,

with the best intentions in the world, attempted to tie upon American

eyes the same Armenian blind as they had permitted to be tied upon

their own eyes. But the United States Government does not conduct its

foreign affairs as the British Foreign Office does. Viscount Grey went

back to London and the Armenian mandate scheme fell through. The

effort to establish a closer relationship between England and the

United States still continues, however, and it would be interesting to

know to what extent, if any, it is directed toward an Anglo-American

combination against Islam in succession to the Anglo-Russian

combination of 1907. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that we in

the United States are under an incalculable debt to the British

democracy, but to the British Foreign Office we owe nothing.

The Turkish recovery of Smyrna in 1922 stripped the blind from the

eyes of the British democracy, but its Foreign Office blinkers are

still fastened about its eyes. Mr. Lloyd George has fallen but Lord

Curzon still remains. British diplomacy does not lightly change its

aims and the Turk whose end was decreed in 1907, is still an unwelcome

outsider in the field of British diplomacy. Lord Curzon has held most

of his gains in the Arab lands of the old Ottoman Empire, but in the

face of the Turkish recovery he has retreated by inches. He still has

a Greek frontier on the Maritza River, 250 miles from Constantinople,

he still perpetuates the split in Islam which pivots on Mosul, he

still refuses to recognize, even in the elaboration of a new _regime_

for the Straits, the indubitable fact of Soviet Russia. Some day the

British democracy may succeed in removing the blinkers from its eyes,

in reducing its Foreign Office to an ordinary department of its

Government, responsible as its other Government departments are, to

its Parliament. Some day the Foreign Office may become the mouthpiece

of an informed democracy. In a day when diplomacy is passing to the

basis of trade, when British Conservatism has already passed to a

business basis, the end of the present anachronism at the Foreign

Office may be not distant.

We need to be scrupulously fair, however, to Mr. Lloyd George and his

Foreign Secretary. Rid of any actual responsibility to Parliament,

they have kicked the beaten Turks into such independence as they have

never known since the golden days of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the

absolutism which Mr. Lloyd George enjoyed, the Turks have finally

attained a degree of nationhood “one and indivisible” which is far

beyond what the most visionary Young Turks of 1908 hoped to attain.

Their historic Christian communities have been rooted up and deported

from the land in which they had lived for four peaceful centuries

under the rule of the Ottoman Caliph, and for this truly colossal

achievement the thanks of a grateful Christendom are due to Mr. Lloyd

George, who attempted to impose alone upon Islam that fate which Sir

Edward Grey had agreed in 1907 to impose in conjunction with Czarist

Russia.

The disestablished Oecumenical Patriarchate still remains in

Constantinople and the departure of Meletios IV on July 10, 1923, may

open its doors to the new Turkish Orthodox Church of Anatolia. The day

seems to be at hand when the remnant of the Turkish Christians, welded

firmly into the Turkish State by the flame of nationalism, may restore

the Patriarchate to those exclusively religious functions which in the

Western view are the only proper functions of a Church.

Nationalism which proposes to substitute its new Eastern _regime_ of

law for the old lawlessness of Western imperialism, is the driving

force of Turkey today and Turkey happens to be the key country of the

world. Nationalism in Turkey today welds and does not divide. Its cry

strikes a sound and healthy note. I heard it in its purest form at

Adana. It was in a theatre, filled to overflowing with Turkish

officers, Turkish townsmen and Turkish peasants. Beyond the

footlights, framed in the little proscenium of the theatre, stood the

plump figure of the poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, now an old man of

seventy-two, his voice hoarsened to a whisper, the perspiration

streaming from beneath his _kalpak_, as he intoned his verse in liquid

Turkish. Once a lonely cry in the wilderness, his voice that night was

punctuated with quick applause. For twenty years he has been lifting

up his cry and today he is still making his way through the scorched

and decimated villages of Turkey, still burning himself out with his

old cry:

“_I am a Turk_;

“_My race and language are great_.”

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

The one footnote was moved to the end of the chapter in which its

related anchor occurs.

Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings, and misspelled words

were left unchanged.

Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Duplicate partial words at line endings were removed.

The text of one sentence, in which one or more lines of text were

misplaced, was not changed:

However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly

it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative

interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could

Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its

Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab

nationalism.

Two instances of wrong usage of words were not changed:

“are” should be “the” ―― “We in are West who are accustomed …”

“no” should be “not” ―― “… was no in contact …”