Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/132

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

it was not the Old Turks who girded him with the Prophet's Sword. Instead of the Mevlevi tchelebi from Konia, he was girded by the sheikh of the great Senussi order whose seat is at Jarabub in the Sahara. A German submarine had taken him aboard at an empty place on the African coast and had landed him at Pola. Throughout the crossing, he had said his prayers five times a day in the forward battery compartment, facing toward Mecca by standard compass.

General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had spent most of a year touring Germany and Austria-Hungary in disgrace, was now recalled and given the Yilderim group (Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Armies) on the Palestine front. But it was too late. Amid the din of a world war crashing to its close, simultaneous offensives were launched in September, by the French command at Salonica with Constantinople as its objective and by the British command in Palestine with Aleppo as its objective. With General Allenby's great break-through overrunning the Syrian corridor, the French imposed an armistice on Bulgaria and the Enver Government fell in Constantinople. Enver Pasha fled to Daghestan, a dapper young Turk still in earnest pursuit of the Pan-Turanian will-o'-the-wisp, and the Opposition inherited the wreck with its capital gripped by a German garrison and French fingers reaching for it from the Maritza.

But the great wheel twirled and clicked. From a French command with the Old Greeks in tow, the new Izzet Government in Constantinople had nothing to hope. From the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian incubus, it had everything to