Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/232

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Pasha continued to snap up munitions wherever he could get them. Some came from the Italians, some came from the French (it is not impossible that the American uniforms in which some of the Turkish soldiers have been clad, were originally left as American surplus stocks in France), and some came from the British, for the British Commander-in-Chief and the British High Commissioner in Constantinople were in as happy accord on the subject of the Greeks as the British War Office and the British Foreign Office have been on a number of other Eastern subjects. In the main, however, the Turkish forces were re-mobilized and re-equipped by the native resourcefulness of the Turk himself, as personified in the dour towering figure of Fevzi Pasha. Even after he had secured foreign ammunition, after gangs of peasant women had trekked it up from the coasts in ox-carts and on the backs of mules and camels, machinery had to be scraped together to change the calibre of much of it before it would fit his guns. There is hardly a more remarkable story in modern military history than the story of how Fevzi Pasha re-mobilized and re-*equipped the Turkish forces out of left-over lots of dismantled artillery and misfit ammunition. The cost of those forces to Anatolia in its impoverished condition has been appalling, but their creation by Fevzi Pasha under the conditions of siege which prevailed, has been no less than miraculous.