Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/170

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them, for in 1915 the Enver Government had at least not been disarmed. Even in Constantinople itself, Turkish opinion became so inflamed against the Damad Ferid Government that machine guns were mounted on Galata Bridge and the Allied High Commissioners were finally compelled to dispatch an inter-Allied Commission, headed by Admiral Bristol, to put a stop to the killing behind Smyrna. The Bristol Commission drew up a lengthy report which fixed immediate responsibility for the Smyrna affair, and Mr. Lloyd George suppressed it at the demand of Mr. Venizelos. By such suppressions has the martyr-legend of Near Eastern Christians grown.

The Greek occupation of Smyrna shook the world, from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. Down in the Turkish cockpit, the Damad Ferid Government became an Allied puppet, Mustapha Kemal Pasha brought the skeleton Third Army down to Amasia to prevent a similar Greek landing at Samsun, a Turkish fighting front was hurriedly extemporized against the Armenians who were gathering under the Anglo-French aegis in Cilicia, and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha hewed out a back door to Central Asia past the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia. In the United States, the religious press opened its columns to every atrocity-charge against the Turks which Greek and Armenian minds could devise. In India, pious Moslems began trekking across the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, fleeing the British Government at Delhi with motives similar to those with which the Pilgrim Fathers once fled from England. Down in the hinterland of Smyrna,