Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/218

 the hospitable American press opened its columns, only a man of Mustapha Kemal Pasha's iron patience could have compelled his angry countrymen to persevere in the search for a peaceful escape from the fate which loomed above them on every frontier. Yet amid the suspicion which possessed Anatolia during those hard years, the Nationalist Party created a new and very real human force known as nationalism. Patriotism, love of one's own soil, is a Western sentiment which would have required a generation under normal circumstances for its transplantation to the Eastern soil of Anatolia, but under the circumstance of a Greek Smyrna, it sprang into existence overnight. The Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, travelling from village to village in Anatolia with a Turkish officer attached to him, added fuel to the new flame of nationalism with his old cry, "I am a Turk; my race and language are great." Newspaper plants, smuggled out from Constantinople, pieces of press machinery concealed in travellers' baggage, handfuls of type dropped into travellers' pockets, produced new dailies and weeklies in Anatolia which poured more fuel on the new flame. The whole culture of the Turks was moved bit by bit from the old capital to the new center of the nation's life. Rafet Pasha's Military Courts of Independence suppressed any attempt to quench the new flame. These Courts were a harsh reminder that there was such a thing as a distinctive Middle Eastern civilization and that it had come to a time when there was no longer any room in Anatolia for natives who were not loyal to their own civilization. The old religious divisions which had split the Anatolian population