Chapter XXI: The Rebirth of Turkey 229 (4)

So “hostilities between the Allies and Turkey” ceased “from noon, local time, on Thursday, 31st October, 1918.” The Straits were unbarred and when the French fingers closed upon Constantinople, British fingers closed with them. General Franchet d’Esperet had to share his command with General Milne. Between rows of British and French bayonets, the German garrison marched out of the capital and the Turks were relieved that the Emperor of India was once again the friend of the Caliph. Allied fleets, to be strengthened soon by most of the British Grand Fleet from the North Sea, steamed up the Dardanelles and anchored in the Bosphorus. Greek battleships followed them, anchoring under the windows of Dolma Bagtsche palace, and the Ottoman Caliph, to spare himself the painful sight, repaired to Yildiz Kiosk which for thirty-two years had been the hermit-home of Abdul Hamid. With Liberal Russia destroyed, the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with the Orthodox Church from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Phanar in Constantinople. Five centuries of history were about to be re-written and Ottoman Greeks in the capital, trampling their _fezzes_, donned Western hats in transports of the wildest joy. The remnant of the Ottoman Armenians did the same; both the Ottoman Empire and Russia were destroyed and nothing (except ten centuries of history) now remained to prevent the resuscitation of the mediaeval Kingdom of Armenia.

But the Ottoman capital had been reduced to a supply base for Denikin. With an Anglo-French command in firm control of the great city, the Russians at last began their entry into Constantinople――big Slavs in uniform who had borne the British to their knees in 1907, huge slit-eyed men once kings in Kafiristan, now grovelling for crusts in the gutters of Galata.

XII

THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN WAR OF 1918-’20

HOW MR. LLOYD GEORGE TRIED TO IMPOSE ALONE UPON ISLAM THAT FATE WHICH GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA HAD AGREED TO IMPOSE TOGETHER IN 1907――THE ANGLO-PERSIAN AGREEMENT――THE “CENTRAL ASIAN FEDERATION”――THE AMERICAN MANDATE IN TRANS-CAUCASIA――THE RETURN OF SOVIET RUSSIA.

The war now began in bitter earnest.

Czarist Russia had been a weight upon Islam which had increased until 1907 when, in agreement with Great Britain, the two Powers began grinding to pieces the last of the independent Islamic States. Russia’s collapse in 1917 and the resultant abrogation of the 1907 Treaty, coinciding with Germany’s collapse, afforded the British Government a marvelous opportunity to reconsider its policy toward Islam. The British had no great enemy left in the East, but apparently the fact did not occur to Mr. Lloyd George. In the Anglo-Russian war of 1918-’20, the British Government took over the business of crushing Islam which Czarist Russia had begun, while attempting to overthrow the Soviet Government and re-instate in office a Russian Government which should concur in the fate which the British alone now sought to impose on the last of the Islamic States. With Constantinople occupied, the Ottoman Sultans could be reduced to simple Amirs of Anatolia whenever Mr. Lloyd George chose. In the meantime, what happened in Turkey hardly mattered. What happened in Russia did matter.

The little Dunsterforce which had been thrown back into Persia by the Turkish capture of Baku, was quickly reinforced from Bagdad and became the British North Persia Force with its base at Kasvin, not far from Teheran. Here it stood in the heart of the old Russian zone, despite a small body of Czarist die-hards who still clung to the old Russian zone in Teheran. Meanwhile the old British zone in the southern half of Persia had been occupied by the South Persia Rifles whose officer personnel was British, and early in 1918 the Government of India had dispatched the East Persia Cordon from Quetta along the Nushki Railway to the new railhead of Duzdap in the Seistan, whence it ran a lorry road north through Persia to Meshed in the old Russian zone and flung out detachments to occupy Askabad and the Merv oasis on the Russian Trans-Caspian Railway.

Late in 1918, the Mudros armistice enabled the North Persia Force to re-occupy Baku in Trans-Caucasia (where it left the Turkish Federalist Party in power) and General Milne occupied Batum from Constantinople. Ostensibly to hold Denikin’s rear, the British occupation of Trans-Caucasia was rapidly completed, the Turco-German forces being evacuated into the eastern provinces and the remnants of the Czarist forces being rounded up and dismissed to Denikin’s front. At Baku, the Czarist Caspian Fleet was maneuvred into British hands and removed to British keeping at Enzeli on the Persian coast. Opposite Baku on the eastern coast of the Caspian, the East Persia Cordon detached from Askabad a small garrison for Krasnovodsk, and Persia was now not only held by British and Indian forces but all its approaches, from north, south, east and west, were in the same hands.

In Denikin’s rear, General Milne at Constantinople now commanded a single British front which crossed Trans-Caucasia from Batum to Baku, which made a British lake of the Caspian, and which extended into Central Asia from Krasnovodsk to Askabad and the Merv oasis. Over all of it, the double-headed eagle of Czarist Russia had waved only a year before. Behind this truly remarkable front, railway projects were speedily envisaged by which the new British Arabia, British Persia and British Trans-Caucasia were to be firmly bound to each other and to British India, a Bagdad-Teheran-Enzeli line to develop Enzeli into a British naval base which should command the Caspian, and a Batum-Kars- Tabriz-Duzdap line to fetch the frontiers of British India to the Black Sea as they had already been fetched to Haifa on the Mediterranean. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle had not only been made good, but the collapse of Czarist Russia had made the British a present of the Constantinople-Kabul line in addition. British officers were glum with expectation.

Sir Percy Cox, chief political officer of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, was dispatched to Teheran as British Minister as soon as the Mudros armistice brought the war to an end on the Mesopotamia front, and began formulating the Anglo-Persian Agreement at once. Persia had then been swallowed whole by the British. The North Persia Force was paying 350,000 _tomans_ a month (roughly $800,000) to keep the Persian Government in being and 100,000 _tomans_ a month to keep the old Cossack Division quiet. Under these conditions, Sir Percy Cox began negotiations in January, 1919, with three Persian grandees and by June the Agreement was ready to be signed. It provided for a British loan of £2,000,000 to the Persian Government and for British advisers in the Persian Ministries. Briefly, it had the effect of reducing Persia to another of the British Indian frontier States. It was finally approved by the British Foreign Office and was signed by the three Persians on August 9. It had been drawn up secretly and no public announcement of its signature was made until August 15, when it was announced simultaneously that the Shah had left for a prolonged tour in Europe. It was to take effect as soon as the Persian Parliament ratified it. At the moment the Parliament was not in session, the deputies having left Teheran in 1915, intending to re-assemble at Kum to follow the Ottoman Empire into war against the Anglo-Russian _entente_.

Meanwhile the East Persia Cordon regularized the position of its garrisons in Meshed and Merv by styling them “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.” It will be recalled that the Amir Habibullah Khan of Afghanistan, a wild country which tilts up to the roof of the world above the north-west frontier of India, had stuck loyally to the British despite a fiery nationalist party which sought to carry him into the war against the Anglo-Russian _entente_. He was still sticking loyally to the British when Czarist Russia fell in 1917 and all of Central Asia fell with it into the most complete confusion. North of him, Bokhara, a smaller country which adjoins the Afghan frontier for nearly half its length, had been nominally independent under the rule of its Emir, Said Mir Alim Khan, in Old Bokhara City, but actually ruled by the Czarist Resident in the Russian cantonment of New Bokhara. The Kerensky Cabinet at Petrograd continued this _regime_, but Soviet Russia recalled the Resident and left the Emir in control. The mutual abrogation of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 had the effect of leaving both Bokhara and Afghanistan in enjoyment of actual independence. The Young Uzbeg Party in Bokhara immediately began an agitation for the introduction of Parliamentary government, but the Emir Said Mir Alim lost no time in discovering new friends at Merv where the Government of India’s East Persia Cordon had set up one of its “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.”

It had never been possible for the British to dictate their own terms to Afghanistan as they did to Persia after the Russian retreat, for the Afghans are made of sterner stuff. Neither the Uzbegs of Bokhara to the north nor the Punjabis of India to the south have shown much love for the Afghans. As for the Persians, the Afghans could doubtless do what they pleased with them. But with the dispatch of the East Persia Cordon to Meshed and Merv, Said Mir Alim of Bokhara and Habibullah of Afghanistan reached an understanding respecting a “Central Asian Federation” which should be “independent of Russian domination.”

Until the Ottoman General Election in November, 1919, an Orthodox priest at Kiskin, near Angora; after the General Election, “acting metropolitan” of the Turkish Orthodox Church.]

Oecumenical Patriarch from February, 1922, to July, 1923.]

The meaning of Bokhara to British India has already been indicated. British command of the Caspian now isolated the Trans-Caspian Railway from Soviet Russia, and with Bokhara detached from Russia and brought within the British Indian orbit, the only remaining Russian railway to the back of India, _i. e._, the Moscow-Orenburg-Tashkent line, would stop at Samarkand as far as its military usefulness to any future Russia was concerned. The Russian spurs to Termez and Kushklinsky Post on the northern frontier of Afghanistan which had been nightmares in British India, would lose their meaning. Any future Russian move against British India would be countered at Bokhara which lies at a sufficient distance to prevent the unsettling effect of Anglo-Russian trouble from making itself felt in India.

But on Feb. 20, 1919, Habibullah was assassinated. Nasrullah seized the throne but, convicted in open durbar of murdering the Amir, he was unseated in favor of the Amir’s third son, Amanullah. Nasrullah’s strong nationalist following rushed pell-mell into an invasion of British India, but was thrown back by the Indian Army. The East Persia Cordon was hurriedly withdrawn to Quetta and the announcement of the Anglo-Persian Agreement’s signature at Teheran was followed three weeks later by a Bokharan revolution in which the Young Uzbeg party dethroned Said Mir Alim and set up its Parliament. Possibly the Young Uzbegs feared a similar British _coup_ at Bokhara City.

Said Mir Alim having fled into Afghanistan, the Soviet Government at Moscow finally concluded military and commercial treaties with the Young Uzbegs on March 4, 1921, which purport to recognize the independence of the Bokhara People’s Soviet Republic. This is Bokhara’s present title, but the British Foreign Office still withholds full recognition from any of the Soviet States. Even as late as May 8, 1923, a note from Lord Curzon to the Soviet Government demanded _inter alia_ the recall of the Soviet Ministers from Teheran and Kabul, and a long statement by Said Mir Alim on the subject of Soviet “treachery” was circulated to the London press on the evening of June 4….

The East Persia Cordon’s hurried scuttle back to Quetta early in 1919 still left the British in control of Persia and in occupation of Trans-Caucasia and Constantinople. General Milne still commanded the Black Sea, the line of the Caucasus Range, the Caspian and the trans-Caspian town of Krasnovodsk. Denikin still stood between Soviet Russia and the British.

Having isolated the starving Armenians of Erivan from any possibility of Russian relief, whether from Denikin or Soviet Russia, the British permitted Americans to embroil themselves in Armenian affairs as intimately as they would. If the United States Government had permitted itself to be rushed into the acceptance of a mandate over the Armenians in Trans-Caucasia, it is not impossible that the British would have gratefully accepted the barrier between Soviet Russia and British Persia which such a mandate would incidentally have furnished. The Armenians had once constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces of the old Ottoman Empire, and if that claim had been disposed of to the United States, not only would an effective barrier have been interposed in front of Russia’s inevitable return to Trans-Caucasia but the remnant of Turkey would have been cut off from the rest of Islam.

By the summer of 1919, however, it had become plain that the United States Government, while anxious to see American relief extended to the Armenians, was unwilling to incur an inevitable quarrel with the future Russia, and General Milne in Constantinople announced that Italy would occupy Trans-Caucasia. Three months later, an Italian military mission on the spot followed the example which the United States Government had set and in September, 1919, the necessity of reinforcing his Constantinople garrison compelled General Milne to pull in his isolated packet of troops in Krasnovodsk and to evacuate Trans-Caucasia down to Batum. Will the Royal Army Service Corps ever issue another ration of caviare in Baku?

Mr. Lloyd George now began peddling Trans-Caucasia all over Europe, offering the Armenians in turn to Holland, Sweden, Rumania, to the League of Nations, to Canada and New Zealand, and even flirting with Turkish Pan-Turanianism. But the spectacle of Mr. Lloyd George bearing gifts to the world attracted the same scrutiny elsewhere as it had already attracted at Washington. Presumably anybody who was able to hold Trans-Caucasia could have had the Armenians in those days (except Denikin and Soviet Russia who alone were both able and willing to take them), for demobilization at home was rapidly putting an end to British ability to hold anything more than Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus and Constantinople.

This sort of thing continued until Denikin began his retreat early in 1920, which sooner or later would expose Trans-Caucasia to the Soviet Government. Still tub-thumping on the subject of the Armenians, the British Foreign Office now gave _de facto_ recognition to the Turkish Federalist Government of Azerbaijian, the _Dashnakoutzian_ Government of Armenia, and the Liberal Government of Georgia. The British War Office rushed men and munitions into Trans-Caucasia to stiffen the three Governments against the approaching Soviet Armies. The British Admiralty hurried out a naval mission to overhaul the old Russian Caspian Fleet in the Persian port of Enzeli.

But the Soviet Armies intercepted the Admiralty’s mission at Baku, threw its personnel into jail, and themselves sent an expedition to Enzeli to take over the old Russian Fleet from beneath the guns of the British North Persia Force. That interception announced Russia’s return to Trans-Caucasia which, since the collapse of Czarist Russia in 1917, has seen more horrors than any other area on the face of this small planet.

The Turkish Federalist Government at Baku was quickly overthrown and on Sept. 30, 1920, the Soviet Government at Moscow concluded peace with the Government of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic which calls itself “the first Moslem Republic in the world.”

The _Dashnakoutzian_ Government of Armenia stood for some time. Like the Armenian independence committees of the old Ottoman Empire, its inexperienced leadership was engaged in appealing to Mr. Lloyd George and to American opinion to protect it, and had refrained from any attempt to achieve that peace with its Russian and Turkish neighbors which was the very first essential of its existence. In the Treaty of Sevres, signed at Paris on Aug. 10, 1920, it was awarded a Turkish frontier which was to be delineated by Mr. Wilson. The American mandate project having fallen through, the Wilson frontier was presumably thought to be the next best method of drawing the United States into Trans-Caucasia. The Wilson frontier had the sole effect of destroying any hopes which might have existed of a Turco-Armenian peace. A state of war which neither Turks nor Armenians could afford, continued to exist until December, 1920, when the Turkish command at Erzerum put a stop to the streams of Moslem refugees which had been flowing out of Armenia, by invading the country and occupying Kars. A Soviet ultimatum stopped Kiazim Karabekr Pasha at Kars. The _Dashnakoutzian_ Government fled. The Soviet Republic of Armenia succeeded it and Mr. Lloyd George’s interest in the Armenians abruptly ceased.

Compelled by the necessity of still further reinforcing his Constantinople garrison, General Milne finally evacuated Batum in favor of the Liberal Government of Georgia. Boundary disputes with the neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenian Governments soon brought the Georgian Liberals into petty frontier wars and a revolution in March, 1921, overthrew them in favor of what is now the Socialist Soviet Republic of Georgia.

Soviet Russia was no in contact with Nationalist Turkey and in the Treaty of Kars which the Turks signed on Oct. 13, 1921, with the Soviet States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Kars and Ardahan provinces which had been wrested from the Ottoman Empire in the Russian War of 1876, were returned to Turkey, and the port of Batum was opened unreservedly to Turkish commerce.

Soviet Russia was now in contact with Persia also. Here, despite the fact that the country was occupied by the North Persia Force and the South Persia Rifles, Sir Percy Cox had been unable to assemble a Persian Parliament which would ratify the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 and in February, 1921, a Russo-Persian Treaty was signed at Moscow in which Soviet Russia abandoned all Czarist Russian claims on the Persian Government and recognized no zones of influence in the country. Meanwhile the North Persia Force maneuvered the Czarist die-hards out of Teheran and itself took over the old Cossack Division, officering it with British personnel. At the last moment, just before the North Persia Force was to retire to its base at Bagdad early in the summer of 1921, the Cossack Division marched on Teheran and installed a new Persian Government which valiantly repudiated the Anglo-Persian Agreement and proposed to share out the Persian Ministries among the Allied Governments and the United States, reserving for the British the right to appoint advisers in the Ministries of War and Finance only. But the Zia-ed-Din Government lasted only as long as the North Persia Force lasted. Zia fled to Bagdad with the last of the North Persia Force in May, 1921. The last of the British officers were withdrawn from the Cossack Division and the South Persia Rifles were disbanded. At present, neither British nor Russians are engaged in reiterating “in the most categorical manner the undertakings which they have repeatedly given in the past to respect absolutely the independence and integrity of Persia.”

Soviet Russia has lifted from Islam the weight with which Czarist Russia once bore it down and Mr. Lloyd George’s Government has not succeeded in its effort to supply alone the weight it took both Russians and British to supply in 1907. Mr. Lloyd George could not prevent Islam in India from joining the Hindus in non-cooperation with the West. He could not prevent Islam in Persia from following to the extent of non-cooperation with his Foreign Secretary. That demon which Sir Edward Grey once lightly referred to as the “spirit” of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, has been slowly departing, wrenching civilizations apart as it went. Its stubborn retreat from the countries it wasted and the slow return of Islam to life in its wake, comprise the background before which the remainder of this narrative is set.

XIII

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR BEGINS

CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE GROWTH OF GREEK NATIONALISM――SURROUNDED BY BRITISH FORCES, THE TURKS GO BACK TO PEACE――APPLICATION OF THE SECRET TREATIES WHICH THE ALLIES HAD DRAWN UP DURING THE WAR――THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE BREAKS OFF ITS RELATIONS WITH THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.

As every body knows, a brook called the Sweet Waters of Europe ripples down into a long bay called the Golden Horn, which divides Constantinople in Europe into two parts. On the northern side, between the crowded Golden Horn and the great Bosphorus, lie the suburbs of Galata and Pera, Galata behind the thicket of masts along its quai and Pera climbing the steep streets onto the hill beyond. Galata and Pera constitute the foreign suburbs where the Embassies, armed with the Capitulations, have never permitted the Ottoman Government to govern, except during the four years of the war when they were not in a position to prevent the Government from abrogating the Capitulations. Here were the Embassies and Legations, all of them except the Persian Legation, although the Ottoman Government was not here and never has been.

Between the little Golden Horn and the great green Sea of Marmora, a bold peninsula curls out to Seraglio Point. Here, within the five-mile wall which encloses its landward side, lies Stamboul to which Galata and Pera bear the same cultural and historical relationship as Yonkers bears to New York. Indeed, one could ignore Galata and Pera as negligible suburbs of foreigners were it not that by the slow expansion of the Capitulations through the centuries, these small foreign suburbs have slowly turned the capital upside down until the Mudros armistice in 1918 finally ushered the Anglo-French command into Pera in possession of complete authority. Here in Stamboul was the seat of the Ottoman Government and here are the greatest monuments of Islam. The broad peninsula on which Stamboul lies is tipped with the great shrines of Islamic culture, its sky-line is pierced with the minarets of its mighty mosques, of _Ayiah Sophia_, _Ahmedieh_, _Valideh_, _Bayazid_, _Suleimanieh_ and _Mohammed II_.

Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of the _Rûm_ community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman Government and was appointed by the Ottoman Minister from a list of three candidates proposed by the Holy Synod. Relations between the Caliph-Sultan and the Patriarch remained generally peaceful even after the Old Greeks secured their independence in the 1820’s, and there was no appreciable Greek nationalism in the _Rûm_ community until the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 called upon Moslems and Christians alike to give up their dividing community institutions and assume the equal rights and the equal duties of Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman nation. That call, accompanied by the opening of the Parliament at Constantinople, brought Greek nationalism from Old Greece into the Ottoman _Rûm_ community, and the Balkan Wars widened the breach which was opening between the Ottoman Government and the Phanar. It produced so difficult a situation that an agreement was finally reached in 1914 between the Old Greek and the Ottoman Governments for an exchange of minorities, but the outbreak of war suspended its operation. Until the spring of 1916 the Ottoman Government, in view of the neutrality of Old Greece, refrained from any steps against its _Rûm_ community, but when the French command at Salonica imposed the Venizelos Government on Athens and brought Old Greece into the war as an enemy, the Ottoman Government took immediate steps to deport its _Rûm_ communicants along the coast of Asia Minor out of the range of Allied naval activity. Like the great Armenian deportations of 1915, these Greek deportations were military in their origin but they were far better controlled throughout their course than the former had been.

After the Mudros armistice in 1918, these Greeks in Asia Minor began to flow back to what remained of their homes, and the remnant of the broken Empire went back with relief to its peacetime pursuits. An unsurpassed commercial opportunity lay ahead of Asia Minor, for the Russian collapse had put an end to the great export of wheat from the South Russian ports. Constantinople, its population swollen by the Allied military and naval forces, now looked exclusively to Asia Minor for its sustenance. Western business men had followed the Allies into the capital in large numbers, and money was available in such quantities as Constantinople had never known. The Empire having been “liberated” from the “Ottoman blight,” American capitalists abounded in the capital, all of them anxious to get in on the ground floor of the boom. Under the Allied aegis, Western trade faced a prodigious opportunity and the peasantry of Asia Minor lost no time in seeking whatever small share of the melon might fall to them. The spring of 1919 found them back at the handles of their rude, ox-drawn plows.

But there were Greek battleships anchored among the Allied men of war in the Bosphorus, and a Turkish guard was quartered in the great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul. Ottoman Greeks in the capital had gone wildly nationalist, finding their hero in Mr. Venizelos, the man who had brought Old Greece into the war. The Oecumenical Patriarch at the Phanar had turned likewise toward Mr. Venizelos, the deliverer of the “unredeemed” Ottoman Greeks. But Balkan wars break when the snow melts in the spring. Through the winter of 1918-’19, the Anglo-French command maintained an outward peace in Constantonople.

Three British high commands held the remnant of the Empire in Asia as firmly in the British grip as Persia was bring held. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Bagdad, had pushed its way up from the flatlands of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin into the rugged hills of southern Kurdistan, the Turkish administration of Mosul withdrawing in front of it to Diarbekr. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Cairo, had reached the top of the Syrian corridor at Aleppo and had flung out small detachments to establish contact with the Bagdad command to the east, and to occupy Cilicia and the Taurus tunnels of the Bagdad Railway to the west, the Turkish administration of Cilicia continuing in office pending an indication of British intentions. Armenian deportees, some of whom had been interned by the Turks in Syria and some of whom had made their way into Egypt to be interned by the British, were being run into Cilicia in large numbers and a few of them were being carried on along the Bagdad Railway as far as Konia, where the E. E. F.’s control ended. The British co-command of the Army of the Black Sea whose Anglo-French G. H. Q. was in Pera, had stationed control officers along the Bagdad Railway from Konia to its Constantinople terminus, along the railways in the hinterland of Smyrna and along the old Russian railways in Trans-Caucasia. The Bagdad Railway had been broken up into its two original parts. The Bagdad and Cairo commands had confiscated it from Konia east and their military trains were rapidly wracking it to pieces. Western Europe was not to be again permitted to escape the Suez Canal. The Pera co-command, however, was working the original Anatolian Railway from Constantinople to Angora and Konia for the _Deutsche Bank_, pending its permanent disposition in the peace treaty.

The collapse of Czarist Russia had enabled the British to establish control not only over Asia Minor but over all its approaches from north, south, east and west, and under the British aegis the secret treaties which had been drawn up during the war for its partition (with the exception of Czarist Russia’s share in them) were soon put into application. The French were admitted to Beirut whence they posted detachments to the Syrian and Cilician centers, remaining however under the British high command in Cairo. Italian forces were disembarked at Adalia and rapidly pushed their way into the hinterland as far as Konia, still keeping their eyes on Smyrna, the greatest of the Asia Minor prizes. Smyrna had been made over to Italy in the secret agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, but the Venizelos Government at Athens had entered the war after that agreement was signed. As for Czarist Russia’s share of the spoils, the United States Government might be persuaded to take the eastern provinces under the supposition that in this twentieth century they still constituted Armenia. As for Czarist Russia’s right to Constantinople, the High Church Party in the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with Orthodoxy from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar. Old Greeks and Ottoman Greeks are alike traders and British naval command of the Mediterranean served to reinforce the less worldly influences which moved Greece inevitably into the British orbit. The French who had brought Greece into the war as soon as Czarist Russia collapsed, only to be compelled to divide their Constantinople command with the British, quickly cooled toward the Greeks and waited for the great wheel to twirl again.

The Anglo-French command in Pera soon divided the Constantinople area, the British taking over the Galata and Pera suburbs, the French taking Stamboul itself, and the Italians taking the Asiatic suburbs. The Ottoman Navy was quickly disarmed and interned in the Golden Horn. With the French controlling the railways in Europe and the British controlling the Anatolian railways, the Ottoman Armies began demobilizing and disarming under Allied supervision, skeleton forces remaining for _gendarmerie_ purposes. So the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire went back to the pursuits of peace and in the lack of Russian exports the Anatolian peasant enjoyed every prospect of a greater prosperity than he had ever known.

But to Mr. Lloyd George, it was an opportunity to impose alone upon Islam that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together. They were more than Balkan snows which began to melt when the Oecumenical Patriarchate broke off its relations with the Ottoman Government on March 9, 1919.

XIV

SMYRNA, 1919

KEMAL RETURNS TO CONSTANTINOPLE――TURKISH CONFUSION IN THE CAPITAL――THE TURKS ASK FOR AN AMERICAN MANDATE――HOW KEMAL AND RAUF BEY LEFT FOR SAMSUN AND SMYRNA, RESPECTIVELY――THE GREEK PONTUS PROGRAM――THE GREEK OCCUPATION OF SMYRNA――THE TURKS GO BACK TO WAR.

General Allenby’s great break-through in Palestine had thrown Mustapha Kemal Pasha back to Adana in Cilicia, where a cypher telegram from Constantinople told him that Rauf Bey was on his way to Mudros to sign an armistice with the British. It was the end of the world for Kemal.

He returned to the capital to find an Anglo-French command quartered in Pera and the entire Constantinople area under effective military occupation. None of the twenty-five clauses of the Mudros armistice seems to have authorized such an occupation. The only mention of Constantinople which occurred in the armistice was a stipulation in clause 4 that Allied prisoners of war and interned Armenians were “to be collected in Constantinople and handed over unconditionally to the Allies.” Allied “use of all ship repair facilities at all Turkish ports and arsenals” was provided in clause 9 and clause 11 stipulated that “wireless telegraphy and cable stations” were “to be controlled by the Allies, Turkish Government messages excepted.” In accordance with these clauses, Allied officers had been assigned to all Turkish ports for control and intelligence purposes. Clause 21 had provided for “an Allied representative to be attached to the Turkish Ministry of Supplies in order to safeguard Allied interests,” but the attachment of an Allied representative would seem to be no more a synonym for military occupation than the use of ship repair facilities or the control of wireless and cable stations.

Allied occupation of Batum was provided in clause 15 and Allied occupation of Baku was mentioned. “Allied occupation of Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts” was specifically stipulated in clause 1, but is the Pera suburb of Constantinople one of the “Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts”? “Secure access to the Black Sea” was stipulated in clause 1 and clause 7 gave the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” But no such situation had arisen at Constantinople and it is difficult to imagine how it could have arisen with the capital lying under the guns of as great a fleet of battleships as lay in the Bosphorus. It is true that the mere appearance of Allied men of war off the city so affected its Greek minority as to bring about a most explosive situation, of which Rauf Bey had warned Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. But a military occupation seems to be quite a different matter from the temporary landing of troops to restrain the Greeks. It is also true that Constantinople was a very useful supply base for Denikin, yet the terms of the Mudros armistice are down in black and white, with Admiral Calthorpe’s signature attached to them, and they do not appear to make an Allied occupation of the capital a legal proceeding.

Rauf Bey had made it plain to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros that no Ottoman Government could submit to the re-imposition of the Capitulations. Under the occupation, the Allies re-imposed them. None of the Allied Governments had recognized their abrogation, but the Mudros armistice was a military and not a civil instrument. Under military law, occupying Armies are authorized to administer only the existing body of enemy civil law and usage, pending the permanent disposition of their occupied enemy territory in the terms of peace. The Mudros armistice contained no mention of the Capitulations or of any other civil matter at issue between the Allied Governments and the Ottoman Government, and their re-imposition during a state of armistice does not seem to have been a legal proceeding.

When Mustapha Kemal Pasha reached the capital, he discovered that the Parliament had been prorogued, the Izzet Government had fallen, and Damad Ferid Pasha had been sent for by the Sultan to form a new Government. The Sultan had left Dolma Bagtsche for Abdul Hamid’s late home at Yildiz Kiosk, and such sound reforms as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 had succeeded in making, the Allies had speedily unmade. In its golden age, the Ottoman Empire had been broadly tolerant, but during its last two centuries of agony the Christian imperialisms of the West had turned its tolerance to poison and since 1908 its own Christian communities had helped to keep the poison circulating in its veins. Its Christian military occupants now re-injected as much of the poison as it had succeeded in throwing out, and this in its capital, the very heart of the country.

With its Parliament prorogued and its press stifled by a military censorship, Turkish opinion was drifting leaderless into confusion. Opposition parties are apt to suffer in time of war and the late Enver Government had so thoroughly broken up its Opposition that the Damad Ferid Government no longer commanded confidence. The intrigues of three Allies, each of them cultivating Turkish support, added to the confusion. Western concession hunters and the Levantinism with which the capital stank, trailed the slime of money over the scene.

Across this unlovely landscape, the Phanar’s break with the Ottoman Government fell like a thunderbolt. Rauf Bey had surrendered at Mudros to an Emperor of India purged of his Russian alliance, but it now became apparent that the Venizelist Government at Athens had succeeded to the place in the Anglo-Russian _entente_ which Russia had vacated. Rauf had applied to Admiral Calthorpe for an Anglo-Turkish alliance, but it now appeared that no such alliance would be granted and it is easy to imagine what effect this desperate situation, if it had really come upon them, had upon the Turks in the capital. The Phanar had now become openly an enemy in Stamboul itself, the Turkish guard in the great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ was heavily reinforced, and a French guard stacked its rifles outside the mosque.

The panic-stricken Turks, still thinking in terms of the Empire, still blind to the great fallen columns about them, launched their Wilsonian League as a bid for new friends. The United States had not declared war against them. The Enver Government had severed diplomatic relations when Washington joined the Allies, but the break had gone no further. Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U. S. N., a naval officer on State Department duty, had occupied the American Embassy in Pera as High Commissioner, restricting his communication with the Ottoman Government to the medium of the Swedish Legation pending the resumption of diplomatic relations. A large colony of Americans had followed him into Constantinople, part of them business men who presently became restive under the tardiness of the boom in materializing, part of them relief workers who discovered to their surprise that Turks have the same number of eyes and ears and legs and arms as the rest of us have. Some of the American colony of which Admiral Bristol was the head, afford this somber narrative a lighter aspect. All our American types were represented in Constantinople―― deep-breathing bishops: apostolic governors of Kansas: “Y” workers whose given names were Fred and Henry and Dick: business men who knew what they wanted and couldn’t get it: courteous and correct Embassy _attaches_: old missionaries with broken hearts and tight lips: sailors who blew in from Mersina, oiled up and blew out again to Samsun: young and autobiographical Near East Relief workers: college presidents who had lived long in the land and were vaguely concerned about the Capitulations: young lady missionaries with a sweetly simple reliance on “these darling British”: and stern “commissioners” of the Near East Relief on “tours of inspection” who learned from Greeks and Armenians that the worst they had been told of the Turk was quite true. At the head of them all was Admiral Bristol, equipped with a flotilla of American destroyers and charged with the defense of American interests in the Ottoman Empire. He enjoyed what was probably the most difficult American position in all of Europe and in it he proved himself a very tower of American strength.

The colony of which he was the head was divided into two sorts, American business men who looked to the American Embassy for their leadership, and American missionary, educational and relief workers who looked not only to the American Embassy but to the British from the Foreign Office in London down to the British Army in Pera without reminding themselves as frequently as they might have done that the British Army, while one of our most gallant Armies, interests itself, and quite rightly, in the King’s peace and in no other peace.

In the absence of any Parliament to speak for than, a number of the most influential Turks in the capital formed themselves into a delegation from the Wilsonian League and pledged themselves early in 1919 to accept an American mandate over the entire country, provided a definite term, preferably fifteen or twenty years, was named for it. This pledge was communicated to Admiral Bristol and forwarded by him to Washington. If such a mandate would not apply the Westernism of the Fourteen Points to the case of Turkey, it was reasoned, it would at least afford the Turks the time they needed to consider their position.

With Turkish civilian opinion now casting about for substitutes for the Parliament which the Damad Ferid Government continued to deny it, Turkish military opinion lost no time in facing the radically new situation which the Phanar’s break with the Porte had precipitated. The General Staff had constituted the driving force of reform in 1908 and it did so again in 1919. Inside a ring of British bayonets, the Asia Minor provinces had been turned loose in semi-independence and were being rapidly disarmed. The Third Army, reduced in personnel and equipment, had been permitted by the Allies to base itself on Sivas and to maintain there a skeleton organization for _gendarmerie_ purposes. Similarly the Ninth Army remained in skeleton form at Erzerum in the eastern provinces, and Turkish refugees were moving slowly back into these wasted and silent provinces and resuming the even tenor of their lives. Greek refugees were being returned to Smyrna and Samsun, a proceeding which would have remained meaningless had not the Oecumenical Patriarchate whose communicants these Greeks were, become openly hostile.

The General Staff had already dispatched agents secretly to the eastern provinces for the formation of local defense committees. Under the Allied military occupation, the Armenian Patriarchate at 21 Rue de Brousse in the Pera suburb of the capital, had openly espoused the program of the old independence committees. The old Armenian Parliamentary _bloc_ had not survived the break-up of the Empire and the old Russian annexationist group had come to a similar end with the break-up of Czarist Russia. Independence of Russians and Turks alike had become the Armenian program and the hope of its realization lay in the British and United States Governments. The former had already manifested concern for the Armenians on numerous occasions, and two organizations were at work in the United States, the Armenia-America Society which was related to the Near East Relief, and the Committee for Armenian Independence which represented the extreme wing of Armenian opinion. American relief workers in the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia were already urging the repatriation of Armenian refugees into the eastern provinces, where they had long constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention and eventual annexation. Against this move the General Staff had prepared the eastern provinces. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha, commander of the Ninth Army at Erzerum, had a large quantity of arms at his disposal, some deposited by the Ottoman Armies retreating from Mesopotamia and some dug up from Russian depots concealed in the mountains.

The Phanar’s break with the Porte was a new development, however, against which the General Staff had made no preparation. Rauf Bey had signed an armistice at Mudros with the Allied Powers, but no armistice had been signed with the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities. If war was now to develope with the latter, action would have to be taken without delay. Accordingly it was determined to dispatch Mustapha Kemal Pasha and Rauf Bey to Samsun and Smyrna, respectively, to form local defense committees and to meet at Sivas where Kemal was to take over the administration of Asia Minor. On the basis of these defense committees, a new political party was to be built up which should compel the Damad Ferid Government to reassemble Parliament and enable the country to consider its future. The beginning of such a party already existed in the capital, but the new National Liberals naturally led a secret existence under the Allied military occupation and it was not until Kemal began building up the party organization in Asia Minor that they openly became the Nationalists.

The surrender of arms to the Allies continued, and in his report to the British War Office on events in Turkey from the time of the Mudros armistice to the signature of the Sevres Treaty, General Milne testifies to the honesty with which disarmament was carried out up to the time of the Greek occupation of Smyrna. The defense committees were not directed against the Allies. Large and small Allied forces, even Allied officers alone, moved freely about the country. The political program with which Kemal was charged, was directed against the Damad Ferid Government, his military program against any partition of the country in favor of Greeks and Armenians. If the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities of the old Empire attempted a transfer of their historic community life from a religious to a territorial basis, the defense committees would constitute the Turks’ reply.

This program was developed in the utmost secrecy, since the Allied occupation had loosed more spies in the capital than Abdul Hamid had ever employed in his palmiest days. The Ottoman Navy having been interned in the Golden Horn, it was an easy matter to dispatch Rauf Bey to Smyrna. He left Constantinople early in May, 1919. Kemal Pasha, however, was a senior Army officer and under the orders of the Ottoman War Office. It was assumed that the Damad Ferid Government would not object to having the capital rid of his presence, but his effectiveness in Asia Minor depended on his authority. He was ostensibly to be sent out as Inspector-General with command of the skeleton forces which General Milne had sanctioned for _gendarmerie_ purposes at Sivas and Erzerum, and the instructions which defined his powers were shown him as soon as they had been drawn up by the General Staff. In a room at the War Office, Kemal spent three hours “correcting” them, until they empowered him with authority to act in every contingency which might conceivably arise. As thus “corrected,” they were placed hurriedly before Damad Ferid’s War Minister and signed without having been read. Duplicate copies, destined for subordinate commanders in Asia Minor, were signed by members of the General Staff. Thus equipped, Mustapha Kemal Pasha left Constantinople for Samsun the day after Rauf Bey had left for Smyrna.

Kemal found British craft in Samsun roadstead and a British control officer in the town with a handful of Indian troops. Greeks were being disembarked and were pushing into the villages in the immediate hinterland. A project was under way for the detachment of the Black Sea littoral, including the ports of Samsun and Trebizond, from the remnant of the Empire and its erection as an independent Greek State under the name of the Pontus. If the Pan-Hellenic program at Constantinople proposed to re-write five centuries of history, if the Armenian program in the eastern provinces proposed to undo the work of ten centuries, the Pontus program also proposed to set aside a half-dozen centuries. It would hardly be fair, however, to judge these three programs by the standards of practicability which are customarily applied in politics, for their strength lay outside the realm of politics. In 1919, we stood in the presence of a Christendom, damp with centuries of Byzantinism, which proposed to commit the very errors in Turkey for which it had frequently blamed Islam.

To thoughtful Turks, it had long been plain that the old Empire was doomed unless it could disentangle itself from the grip of religious usage. An attempt had been made in 1908 at this precise task of disentangling religion and politics. It had failed because neither the Old Turks nor the Christian communities would permit it to succeed. Christendom and Islam alike proved immovable. Turks, Greeks and Armenians threshed themselves to pieces in the religious deadlock which the Young Turks failed to break in 1908 and by 1919 Greeks and Armenians were prepared to set up new Christian theocracies on the wreck of an old Moslem theocracy. The _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities had clung immovably to their full community rights after 1908 and by 1919 the break-up of the Empire had made possible the transfer of their communities, with the concurrence of Christendom, from their old religious, to a new territorial, basis.

Kemal rode up into the hills behind Samsun. Under the blue skies of an Anatolian spring, he made his way from village to village. He reached Sivas where Colonel Rafet Bey was in command of the skeleton Third Army, simultaneously with a rumor that Great Britain had given Smyrna to the Greeks and that the greatest sea-port of Asia Minor had been the scene of massacres by Greek troops. Telegrams to Angora where a British control officer was receiving munitions surrendered under the Mudros armistice, brought a prompt denial. But the rumor grew. What purported to be stories of the massacres and of the flight of Turkish civilians from Greek soldiers in the hinterland of Smyrna, accompanied it. The British control officer at Angora denied it again, emphasizing the fact that the armistice had been signed by the British Government and no Greek occupation of Smyrna was possible without British consent. But a telegram soon reached Sivas from the Ottoman War Office in Constantinople, announcing that Smyrna had been occupied by the Greeks and that Admiral Calthorpe had supervised the occupation. British control officers along the railways fled to Constantinople at once and most of them were fortunate enough to reach their destination.

Meanwhile, Rauf Bey had reached Smyrna on May 13. On May 14, Admiral Calthorpe entered the bay with an Allied naval squadron from Constantinople. The Allied control officers ashore were ordered to disarm the Ottoman garrison and confine it to its barracks. At 6:30 o’clock in the evening, Admiral Calthorpe announced that the city would be occupied by Allied troops the next morning. A vague rumor that Greek troops were to be used brought a repetition of the announcement that _Allied_ troops would occupy the city. But the rumor persisted and as night drew on, the population of the Turkish quarter withdrew to a hill-top behind the town and gathered around huge bonfires in an all-night protest meeting.

By 7 o’clock the next morning, the Ottoman garrison had been withdrawn to its barracks. By 10 o’clock, British marines had disembarked onto the quai and had occupied the telegraph offices, and Greek troops were landing from their transports. They marched first to the _konak_, the seat of the provincial administration, and occupied the building amid scenes of growing confusion which the Greek commander either could not or would not control. From the _konak_, they marched to the barracks and the firing which had already begun culminated in the raking of the barracks with machine guns. At the barracks and elsewhere, in Smyrna City and deep into its hinterland, the killing continued for days. Twice Rauf Bey was overtaken by the rapid Greek advance and had to flee farther into the hinterland. Events might or might not have turned out differently if Rauf had landed at Smyrna a month before he did, but one reason for the lack of any Turkish defense of Smyrna was the quite simple reason that there had been no time in which to prepare a defense.

It was disastrous news which Rauf conveyed through the interior as he continued on his way to join Kemal at Sivas. It affected the Turks far more than even the Armenian sack of Van had affected them, for in 1915 the Enver Government had at least not been disarmed. Even in Constantinople itself, Turkish opinion became so inflamed against the Damad Ferid Government that machine guns were mounted on Galata Bridge and the Allied High Commissioners were finally compelled to dispatch an inter-Allied Commission, headed by Admiral Bristol, to put a stop to the killing behind Smyrna. The Bristol Commission drew up a lengthy report which fixed immediate responsibility for the Smyrna affair, and Mr. Lloyd George suppressed it at the demand of Mr. Venizelos. By such suppressions has the martyr-legend of Near Eastern Christians grown.

The Greek occupation of Smyrna shook the world, from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. Down in the Turkish cockpit, the Damad Ferid Government became an Allied puppet, Mustapha Kemal Pasha brought the skeleton Third Army down to Amasia to prevent a similar Greek landing at Samsun, a Turkish fighting front was hurriedly extemporized against the Armenians who were gathering under the Anglo-French aegis in Cilicia, and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha hewed out a back door to Central Asia past the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia. In the United States, the religious press opened its columns to every atrocity-charge against the Turks which Greek and Armenian minds could devise. In India, pious Moslems began trekking across the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, fleeing the British Government at Delhi with motives similar to those with which the Pilgrim Fathers once fled from England. Down in the hinterland of Smyrna, the West stood with bayonets fixed, confronting an East which had been largely disarmed.

It appears to be unquestioned that no clause of the Mudros armistice authorized the Allies to occupy Smyrna. The only clause which has been advanced as possibly covering the occupation, is clause 7 which gives the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” None of the dozen Allied officers who had been posted to Smyrna has ever claimed that a situation existed there which threatened even their own security, to say nothing of the security of the Allies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha at Sivas interpreted the occupation as a violation of the armistice by the Allies themselves and held it accordingly as no longer binding. The surrender of munitions to the Allies ceased immediately. The Anatolian peasant left his growing crops and went angrily back to war.

XV

THE ORTHODOX SCHISM IN ANATOLIA

KEMAL FALLS TO THE STATUS OF A “BANDIT”――TURKISH NATIONALISM BEGINS TO RE-MOBILIZE AND RE-EQUIP ITS FORCES――THE ERZERUM PROGRAM AND THE NATIONALIST VICTORY IN THE OTTOMAN ELECTIONS――HOW PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI BROKE WITH THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE――THE TURKISH ORTHODOX CHURCH――PAPA EFTIM HIMSELF.