Chapter XXI: The Rebirth of Turkey 229 (5)

Mr. Lloyd George had announced his program at Smyrna. He proposed to build a new Near East on the basis of its Christian minorities, confronting Soviet Russia with a Greek _fait accompli_ across the Straits on a parity with the American mandate in Trans-Caucasia and the eastern provinces, the British Persia and the Afghan-Bokharan business with which it was proposed to confront it elsewhere. As for Islam, he would impose alone upon it that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together.

The reply to this program was Turkish Nationalism. Rid of the burden of the old Empire, freed of sole responsibility for the Caliphate, Mustapha Kemal Pasha proposed to break the religious deadlock in which the Turks had threshed themselves to pieces and to apply the same Westernism to his own nation as the West had long applied to its Greeks and Armenians. Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish _tekkes_ at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be permitted to poison the country with their political reaction.

Inside a ring of British and Greek bayonets, the Turks flocked to the new Nationalist Party, not because the mass of Turkish opinion had any understanding of the meaning of nationalism but because Smyrna had stripped the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople of the very small Turkish support with which it had entered office. Beginning in the eastern provinces which were farthest from the capital, the defense committees which constituted the framework of the Party, arrested Damad Ferid’s provincial officials and deported them to Constantinople, installing Nationalist administrations in their places. This proceeded so rapidly that Ferid telegraphed Kemal to return to the capital at once. Despite the fact that Ferid’s orders bore all the prestige of the _Grand Vizierate_, Kemal disregarded them and on July 11, 1919, Ferid dismissed him from the Army. From a senior officer and a military hero, Kemal now fell to the status of a “bandit,” who knew in all probability that it was only a matter of time until he would be caught and shot.

The Nationalist Party had a dual program. Its political objective was to compel the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople to re-assemble Parliament and permit the country to consider its future. Its military objective was to prevent the further partition of what it believed to be Turkish soil. Under the impetus of Smyrna, it was comparatively easy to take over province after province in Asia Minor and to put the Government in a position in which it would sooner or later be compelled to reckon with its new Opposition. Its military objective was far less easy of attainment. About 20,000 troops had been permitted to remain at Sivas and Erzerum for _gendarmerie_ purposes. A quantity of munitions, particularly in the eastern provinces, had not yet been surrendered. A further quantity was dug up from old Russian depots, concealed during the great Russian advance of 1915-’16. More were smuggled across the Black Sea from Denikin’s rear in South Russia, as soon as it became known that a market for arms had developed in Asia Minor. Still more, particularly artillery, had been dismantled by the Allies and left in Turkish possession; these needed only new breech-blocks and range-finders, the construction of which began at once out of any scrap metal available. Hidden away in the secrecy of Asia Minor, Nationalism began to re-mobilize and re-equip its tattered and frequently bare-footed soldiers.

So rapidly did the Party grow that two months after the Smyrna occupation, Kemal and Rauf were able to assemble it in a caucus at Erzerum in the eastern provinces. Kemal’s staff drove up to Erzerum along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become famous under the name of the National Pact.

This document re-stated and amplified the Izzet Government’s position, as Rauf Bey had conveyed it to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. Autonomy for the Arabs under the necessary suzerainty of the Caliph at Constantinople and Allied recognition of the Enver Government’s abrogation of the Capitulations, were its principal planks. The break-up of the old Empire was accepted and in the new map of the Near and Middle East, the Caliphate of Islam was modified to permit the application of the Western tradition of nationalism to Turks and Arabs alike, an application to which the Turks claimed as complete a right as the West had long before acknowledged to Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians. From the Greeks, the West had never asked Capitulations. It would therefore not ask Capitulations from the Turks. As for the rights of minorities, such rights as the Greeks gave their Moslem minorities, the Turks would give their Christian minorities. The Straits would remain open to world commerce, subject only to the necessary military security of Constantinople, “the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters of the Ottoman Government.” In the delineation of the new Turkey’s frontiers, certain border areas were under dispute. Two of these border areas, Cilicia and the Mosul province, “are inhabited by an Ottoman Moslem majority united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued with sentiments of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and wholly respectful of each other’s racial and social rights and surrounding conditions,” and these belonged within the Turkish frontiers. To certain other border areas (Western Thrace and the three districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum in Trans-Caucasia), the West could, if it wished, apply the device of the plebiscite with which it was accustomed to decide the destinies of populations elsewhere. As for the place of the new Turkey in the family of nations, the Party repeated Rauf Bey’s statements to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros: “It is a fundamental condition of our life and continued existence that we, like every country, should enjoy complete independence and liberty in the matter of assuring the means of our development, in order that our national and economic development should be rendered possible and that it should be possible to conduct affairs in the form of a more up-to-date regular administration.” On this note, the Party’s platform closed. Three weeks later, a copy of it lay on Lord Curzon’s desk in the Foreign Office in London, and Colonel Alfred Rawlinson, a brother of Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-Chief in India, was returned to Erzerum to learn what it was that Kemal really wanted.

Having drawn up the Party’s platform, the Erzerum caucus adjourned to meet in September at Sivas, where a standing council of twelve members was chosen to sit continuously at Angora, a provincial capital whose rail and telegraphic communication with Constantinople was more direct than Sivas’s. The Damad Ferid Government’s position with respect to the country had now become so impossible that it fell on October 5 and was replaced by the Ali Riza Government which was authorized by the Sultan to hold a general election. This was a clean-cut victory for the Nationalists and two days after the new Government took office, Kemal telegraphed the Party’s platform to Ali Riza Pasha in Constantinople, as the terms of peace on which the Nationalists appealed to the country.

At this junction, the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar forbade Ottoman Greeks to participate in the elections on the ground that they were no longer Ottoman subjects. This injunction was of course obeyed in the capital where Allied troops were in occupation, but a considerable portion of the _Rûm_ community lived in Asia Minor and here, already gravely compromised with their Turkish neighbors by the Phanar’s break with the Porte and by the Greek occupation of Smyrna which had followed that break, it only added to their difficulties. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what move more dangerous to its own communicants in Asia Minor the Phanar could have made. It so increased the suspicion which attached to them in the eyes of the Nationalists that hundreds of them were clapped into Nationalist jails and were not released until a Turkish-speaking Orthodox priest from Kiskin, twelve miles from Angora, announced his intention of breaking with the Phanar and participating in the elections as an Ottoman subject. He immediately undertook to effect a similar break on the part of the Turkish-speaking Orthodox churches in the interior, and the Oecumenical Patriarch summoned him to report at the Phanar at once. He disregarded both the Phanar’s summons and the excommunication which followed it, and continued to align his people with the Nationalists.

Papa Eftim Effendi, acting metropolitan of the Turkish Orthodox Church, is a subject to be approached with all caution for he may yet develope into a phase of the new Turkey more important for Christendom than Kemal himself. Christian solidarity broke down when the Phanar threw its communicants in Asia Minor into a political position which brooked not an instant’s neutrality. As long as Ottoman Christians were given an inferior position under Moslem law, the concern of Western Christians for the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities of the old Empire had a legitimate basis. The Byzantinism which colored our Western concern for Ottoman Greeks and Armenians may have blinded us at times to the actual position they occupied in the old Empire, but the legal position which Moslem law gave them was certain ultimately to be resented. There came a time when thoughtful Turks agreed with us, not out of concern for non-Moslems but in the belief that the Empire was being slowly strangled by the religious usages which had tightened about it. The Young Turks made an honest attempt in 1908 at reforms designed ultimately to give all races of the Empire an equal position as Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman State. That attempt broke down for several reasons. One was that the Young Turkish program was repugnant to Islam. Another was that the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities stuck to every jot of their community rights. Whether rightly or wrongly, they would not be given a common position with their Moslem neighbors. To American missionaries on the spot, the failure of the Young Turkish program was a bitter disappointment for they knew what the price of failure would be to Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike. But American Protestantism in the United States generally concurred in the refusal of the Ottoman Christians to make that gesture of confidence without which the Young Turkish program was bound to fail. The missionaries knew that if the religious deadlock which the 1908 Revolution sought to break, had finally to be broken by force, only Western military intervention could save the Christians from defeat. But their tongues were tied in the United States. Churchmen at home stiffened the Greeks and Armenians while refusing to note the very grave problems for which it was essential that the Turks should discover a solution.

Papa Eftim Effendi, however, has made the gesture of confidence. Under his leadership, sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior gave up their church schools on March 1, 1922, their pupils being sent thereafter to the Government’s schools. The old _Rûm_ community regarded its schools with considerable pride, for they were centers of Greek nationalism. In the old Empire, they were centers of Orthodox reaction just as the mosque schools were centers of Moslem reaction. These churches in the interior have given up their right to administer Orthodox civil law. Turkish courts, under the Ministry of Justice, now administer Orthodox law for Orthodox litigants, supposedly as British courts administer Moslem law in India. The churches which have formed the new Turkish Orthodox Church under Papa Eftim’s leadership, are as free to worship as they have always been (and that freedom has been possibly greater than Westerners have sometimes attributed to the Ottoman Government). Politically, however, their communicants have thrown in their lot with the Turks. Their clergy wear the black robe and black cylindrical hat of Orthodoxy only while engaged in their clerical duties. At all other times, they wear the Turkish _kalpak_.

But the wider interest which gathers around Papa Eftim at present lies in the fact that he has destroyed the old basis of Christian solidarity and has opened up the possibility of a quite new basis. The old solidarity, whether rightly or wrongly, has levied a fearful toll upon Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike during these last few years. But it is just possible that Papa Eftim has given us the prospect of a new solidarity upon a purely religious basis. It is a prospect to be approached with all reserve, for it suggests a new Western attitude toward the Near and Middle East whose benefits both to Christendom and to Islam may prove to be incalculable. Time will develope Papa Eftim’s full significance. Unless hostility to the Turk is an article of the Christian creed, his is the most meaningful figure in Turkey today.

A note reached me late one morning during my stay in Angora, to the effect that Papa Eftim Effendi was in the city and was anxious to call. Two hours later, Djelal Noury Bey, a prominent Turkish editor and a deputy in the Grand National Assembly, entered with Papa Eftim following. Eftim was a black-eyed, bushy little man and the figure he presented, a Turkish _kalpak_ resting on his uncut Orthodox hair and his long Orthodox beard flowing over the turned-up collar of a wolfskin coat, is one which may be commended to those who knew the old Ottoman Empire. The following dialogue ensued:

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?

Djelal Noury (smiling): He is of the Turkish race.

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you of Turkish blood?

Djelal Noury (smiling cordially): The Turkish Orthodox Church was his own idea. He organized it himself.

Self (to Papa Eftim): Do you speak Turkish?

Djelal Noury (still smiling cordially): He wants to go to the League of Nations at Geneva. He asks do you think he ought to go?

Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?

Djelal Noury (smiling still more cordially): He asks whether you may be a Protestant. He says if you are, you and he are the same for neither of you recognize the Pope.

This sort of thing seemed to be of no profit to any of us and the matter was accordingly allowed to drop, Djelal Noury leaving with Papa Eftim carefully in tow. We Westerners of course are quite superior to this device of the carefully staged interview, since our own politicians in the West are as indifferent to publicity as a cat is to catnip.

A half-hour later, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I told him I had formed the highest opinion of his chaperone but had had no opportunity to form any opinion of Eftim himself. Something apparently happened behind the scenes during the next day or two for two evenings later, Papa Eftim unexpectedly knocked at my door and entered stark alone. It was two hours afterward when he left and during those two hours nobody interrupted us. I believe that no lawyer ever put a witness through a more thorough examination than I put Papa Eftim on that evening. When he left, his pale thin hands shook with emotion. As he went out, he stopped in the door-way and this is what he said: “This is our country and the Turks are our own people. How can we forsake our country when it needs us?”

I have no means of knowing who put this strangely Western idea into Papa Eftim’s head originally. Certainly it was not that stronghold of Easternism, the Oecumenical Patriarchate. Wherever it did come from, I believe there is not the slightest question of the sincerity with which Papa Eftim holds it today. His is the almost fanatical sincerity of a minority which feels itself misunderstood.

The morning after I talked with him, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I made him a non-committal answer to the effect that he seemed to me to be the merest shadow of a man physically to be cast in such a great _role_. Fifteen minutes after my Turkish caller left, my door opened and the largest Orthodox priest I have ever seen loomed in the door-way, a vast ignorant mound of a man who announced unctuously that he was one of Papa Eftim’s assistants in the Turkish Orthodox Church. I looked him over slowly from his huge feet all the way up to his uncut Orthodox beard and the Turkish _kalpak_ stuck on top of it, while he watched me with the black ox-like eyes of a people whom no man has ever long succeeded in budging unless they were willing to be budged. Then I thanked him and told him he would do quite nicely. He turned slowly and the stairs creaked beneath his tread as he went ponderously away.

XVI

THE TREATY OF SEVRES

RAUF BEY TAKES THE NATIONALIST DEPUTIES FROM ANGORA TO CONSTANTINOPLE―― INDIA COMPELS MR. LLOYD GEORGE TO LEAVE CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE TURK AND GENERAL MILNE BREAKS UP THE PARLIAMENT, DEPORTING RAUF AND MANY OF HIS COLLEAGUES TO MALTA――THE SEVRES TREATY AND HOW DAMAD FERID PASHA SECURED AUTHORITY TO SIGN IT.

The elections which the Ali Riza Government held, resulted in a clean sweep for the Nationalists and a situation of considerable delicacy was now precipitated. It was hardly possible for the new Parliament, charged with the execution of the Erzerum program, to function freely under the enemy occupation in the capital. On the other hand, it was the country’s legally elected Parliament and it was highly desirable that it should be recognized as such. Pending decision as to its course, its deputies assembled at Angora where the Party’s standing council was in session in the gray granite building which had once been the provincial headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress. Here an intimation reached the deputies that the Allies were prepared to recognize the new Parliament if its session was held in the capital and was opened in a legal fashion by the Sultan’s speech, but that it would not be recognized if it met in Angora. Accordingly a large proportion of the deputies, headed by Rauf Bey, the Parliamentary leader of the Party, left Angora for Constantinople and on Jan. 11, 1920, the new Ottoman Parliament opened its session. Despite the conditions of military occupation under which it met, Rauf Bey discharged his duties with inflexible courage and on January 28, the Erzerum program, now known as the Turkish National Pact, was legally adopted by the legal Parliament sitting in its legal capital.

Trouble was now plainly in the air. Only the day before the adoption of the Pact, the re-mobilizing Nationalist forces in Asia Minor had raided a dump of surrendered munitions on the Gallipoli peninsula. Behind its Asiatic suburbs, their forces had crept into the very outskirts of Constantinople. The Allied occupation was becoming a touch-and-go matter.

Other developments contributed to the gravity of the situation. Mr. Lloyd George who had been striding up and down the Rubicon, had made a dismaying discovery. It seemed that there was a place called India. The British Foreign Office was also having its troubles. Pilgrimage to Mecca had ceased and Islam was not displaying that gratitude at the payment of British subsidies to King Hussein of the Hejaz, which Lord Curzon expected of it. Mr. Lloyd George accordingly ceased striding up and down the Rubicon and seated himself in a waiting posture on its bank. On February 26, he told the House of Commons in London that his statement of Jan. 5, 1918, respecting Constantinople as the Turkish capital, “was specific. It was unqualified and it was very deliberate. It was made with the consent of all parties in the community. It was not opposed by the Labor Party.” Preparations were accordingly made to leave Constantinople to the Turk in the peace settlement, and London editors (who as a rule are not Moslems) began turning over projects for the “Vaticanization” of the Caliphate of Islam.

On the night of March 15-16, during the temporary absence of his French co-commander, General Milne seized the telegraph offices in Constantinople, isolated the capital from Asia Minor, executed a series of lightning raids at midnight, arrested every Nationalist deputy in the Ottoman Parliament whom he could lay his hands on, and embarked them on transports for internment on Malta. By dawn of the 16th, British forces held the city securely in their grip, Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues were _en route_ to barbed wire compounds on Malta, the rest of the Nationalist deputies were clambering up the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus to begin their long trek back to Angora, General Milne was soon to be recognized as the Allied Commander-in-Chief, and Constantinople was ready to be left to the Turk.

On April 6, the Ali Riza Government gave way to a second Damad Ferid Government. On April 11, Ferid issued a Sultanic edict denouncing Nationalism, and a similar edict was issued by the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_ who had entered his high office upon the arrest and deportation to Malta of his predecessor (the German occupation of Belgium during the war had left Cardinal Mercier unmolested, but no such nice scruples have troubled the British occupants of Constantinople). Meanwhile, military events were moving rapidly. The Circassian leader, Anzavur, who had been launched against the Nationalists, had flickered out after a few local successes along the Asiatic shore of the Straits, and it became evident that serious operations would have to be undertaken if Constantinople was to be held. Every British man of war in the Mediterranean was ordered to Constantinople and, with the second Ferid Government launching its religious thunderbolts at the Nationalists, Allied conferences at Hythe and Boulogne called on the Greeks behind Smyrna to screen the Straits from the “Kemalists.” In conjunction with British naval units, the towns along the Asiatic shore of Marmora were quickly occupied. Thrace was given to the Greeks in Europe to protect the capital from the Nationalists in its rear, and a British Constantinople was now firmly embedded in a Greek setting. The High Contracting Parties were now prepared to “agree that the rights and title of the Turkish Government over Constantinople shall not be affected, and that the said Government and His Majesty the Sultan shall be entitled to reside there and to maintain there the capital of the Turkish State.”

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.