Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/193

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  • dow, in readiness to hurry him farther into the

interior on an instant's warning. The first building one passes upon entering the town from the railway station is the gray granite building once used as the local headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress, with a wooden theatre lying in the center of a garden across the road. Some distance to the left, as one continues into the town, is the old konak, or Government building, where the provincial administration was formerly housed. Across the square in front of it, is the Post and Telegraph Office. On the right hand as the town is entered, a broad street turns off past the theatre and leads around the foot of the town to the beautiful compound of the Sultana College. Almost opposite the theatre as one turns into this road, is a large school building of stone and some distance farther along is the stone building formerly occupied by the local administration of the Public Debt. Still farther along, far out in the outkirts of the town, the blue and white buildings of the Sultana College stand within the walls of their compound. Here Fevzi Pasha, a towering Anatolian Turk with drooping moustaches, and Rafet Pasha, a dapper little figure, were engaged in re-mobilizing and re-equipping the Army. Fevzi Pasha is a dour giant of a man with a gargantuan appetite for work and a complete aversion from social intercourse of any sort. Rafet Pasha has a similar capacity for work but he combines with it a natural genius for social intercourse. I have seen him in a number of widely varying settings, from his quarters in the Sultana College to the mountain passes of Anatolia in the dead of winter, but he is invariably as immaculate both in