the most excellent meal I ever tasted in such miserable surroundings, we had a long talk with General Mouedine Pasha and his two sons about politics and some curious stories they had heard somewhere about England. It is natural that these men should not be interested in any other subject. The general, he told us, had been in and out of prison for the last fifteen years—exiled by Abdul Hamid, escaping, and caught again. After the Armistice he left Constantinople, at great personal risk, to join M. Kemal Pasha; was, for a time, Governor of Adana, and is now taking up his post as Ambassador at Teheran. Most of the leading soldier Nationalists—M. Kemal Pasha and Fethi Bey among the rest—seem to have been his grateful pupils, and, naturally, he is a proud man to-day.
If only the authorities at Lausanne had known or could imagine anything about life in Angora during the last three years! All the best men exiled, persecuted, and imprisoned. What wonder that Nationalism had grown into a religion!
He was indignant at the suggestion that French officers, or a British strategist, were "wanted" in the Turkish Army. "My pupils," he said, "are more fitted to give instruction than to receive it. . . .
"The buying and selling of munitions, the haggling and bargaining introduced in the army—all that ought not to be—came from Germany."
He was not the only "big man" in Turkey to lose faith in their war-ally, or to recognise some compensation for their terrible defeat in the freedom from Teuton rule that it involved; but they are not, therefore, any more kindly disposed to the yoke of "the Allies."
Eski-Chéir had been one of the most flourishing towns in Anatolia, and was destined from its position as a junction between two big railway lines—Angora and Baghdad—to become more prosperous year by year. Every town, of course, has its own story of looting, "violation of women," and fire; but to the spectator all now seem very much alike, and what
