- teen 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
