in this agreement not only to put an end to the expensive state of war which the French command at Beirut was facing in Cilicia, but also to salvage the Perier railway concession which had been the subject of French negotiations with the old Ottoman Government in 1914. A French loan of £22,000,000 had been offered the old Government in February of that year of which £16,000,000 was paid in the following April, the French Perier group taking in return a concession for 1,800 miles of railway line in northern and eastern Anatolia. The loan, however, had never been completed, the concession had never been ratified by the old Parliament and it seems quite probable that, even if it had been, the war would have cancelled it. But peace in Cilicia had become an urgent necessity, for the Turkish forces were slowly pushing the Franco-Armenian Armies back toward the sea. To secure peace, as well as any other objectives which M. Franklin-Bouillon may have had in mind, the French Foreign Office surrendered to Turkey a long strip of territory, beginning with Cilicia and running east to the Mosul province, a French company, however, maintaining the right of operating the Bagdad Railway from the port of Mersina in Cilicia to its eastern terminus on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia.
News of this surrender so embittered the French Army that General Dufieux, the French commandant in Cilicia, left Adana immediately for Beirut, leaving behind him only subordinate French officers to carry out the evacuation. It threw the Armenians in Cilicia into a panic. In preparing their independent Armenian State under the French
