Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/189

 such nice scruples have troubled the British occupants of Constantinople). Meanwhile, military events were moving rapidly. The Circassian leader, Anzavur, who had been launched against the Nationalists, had flickered out after a few local successes along the Asiatic shore of the Straits, and it became evident that serious operations would have to be undertaken if Constantinople was to be held. Every British man of war in the Mediterranean was ordered to Constantinople and, with the second Ferid Government launching its religious thunderbolts at the Nationalists, Allied conferences at Hythe and Boulogne called on the Greeks behind Smyrna to screen the Straits from the "Kemalists." In conjunction with British naval units, the towns along the Asiatic shore of Marmora were quickly occupied. Thrace was given to the Greeks in Europe to protect the capital from the Nationalists in its rear, and a British Constantinople was now firmly embedded in a Greek setting. The High Contracting Parties were now prepared to "agree that the rights and title of the Turkish Government over Constantinople shall not be affected, and that the said Government and His Majesty the Sultan shall be entitled to reside there and to maintain there the capital of the Turkish State."

On May 11, the terms of peace were handed to two of Ferid's appointees at Paris. These terms proposed to close the Greek pincers about Constantinople, to cut it off from Asia Minor permanently with a garrison restricted to 700 men, to isolate the Straits from Asia Minor by the institution of an International Commission on which Russia and Turkey would be represented if and