Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/161

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

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