the first of October, the Greeks were back in their old positions covering the railway junctions at Eski-Shehr and Afium and the Turkish recovery of Smyrna became only a matter of time. By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief's representatives in Angora, compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the Near East Relief's headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Smyrna.
The Turkish victory on the banks of the Sakaria radically changed the political complexion of the Near and Middle East. For 200 years, the West had been breaking down the old Ottoman Empire, but on the Sakaria River it encountered the Turk himself and when it touched the Turk the tide of history turned. History will one day find in this obscure engagement on the Sakaria one of the decisive battles of our era.
The French Foreign Office which had been waiting on the outer rim of events ever since the Mudros armistice deprived the French Army of its anticipated sole command in Constantinople, now dispatched M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon to Angora, where he negotiated the Franco-Turkish peace agreement of October 20, 1921. Although the covering letter from Yusuf Kemal Bey, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Government, contains the only reference to "economic preference" which marked the result of the Franklin-Bouillon negotiations, the French Foreign Office probably hoped
