Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/156

 The French who had brought Greece into the war as soon as Czarist Russia collapsed, only to be compelled to divide their Constantinople command with the British, quickly cooled toward the Greeks and waited for the great wheel to twirl again.

The Anglo-French command in Pera soon divided the Constantinople area, the British taking over the Galata and Pera suburbs, the French taking Stamboul itself, and the Italians taking the Asiatic suburbs. The Ottoman Navy was quickly disarmed and interned in the Golden Horn. With the French controlling the railways in Europe and the British controlling the Anatolian railways, the Ottoman Armies began demobilizing and disarming under Allied supervision, skeleton forces remaining for gendarmerie purposes. So the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire went back to the pursuits of peace and in the lack of Russian exports the Anatolian peasant enjoyed every prospect of a greater prosperity than he had ever known.

But to Mr. Lloyd George, it was an opportunity to impose alone upon Islam that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together. They were more than Balkan snows which began to melt when the Oecumenical Patriarchate broke off its relations with the Ottoman Government on March 9, 1919.