Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/207

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eight deputies in the Grand National Assembly. So the Seljukian ghost was laid and the Caliphate came into the Nationalists' keeping.

The Nationalist hold on the interior of Asia Minor now became indisputable. The munition factories in the rear of Ismet Pasha's slowly growing forces on the Smyrna front, were quickly enlarged and Konia became a war-center of the first importance in the interior. A considerable number of Armenians who had been returned to Konia after the Mudros armistice and who had voluntarily remained in their homes when the British offered to evacuate them at the time of their own evacuation of the Bagdad Railway, had been compromised anew by the Greek occupation of Smyrna and were placed under increasing military surveillance as the number of Turkish munition factories in the town grew. Armenian "indiscretions," however, finally led to the deportation of men of military age farther into the interior, and the locking up of their churches in Konia. The juxtaposition of a Turkish munition factory and an Armenian church is one which is possibly apt to produce "indiscretions." When I was last in Konia, the only Armenians there were women and children. A number of mosques in the town had been taken over for military depots, but no Armenian church in the town had been so taken over. The churches were locked up but otherwise untouched. The Armenian women in the town were permitted to receive no mail from the outside world, for the Nationalist censors were supposed to read Turkish and French only, not Armenian. No Turk ever learns Armenian, and apparently there was no Armenian in