Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/228

 country will in time find their way into Soviet Armenia and those who remain in Turkey will be given equal rights and equal duties with the Turks themselves. Turks and Armenians understand each other well. Until fifty years ago, they had lived together on generally peaceful terms for several centuries and the fact (to come no nearer home) that Czarist Russia has disappeared, seems to promise the possibility of an eventual resumption in the new Turkish State of that peace which once characterized their relationship

The French evacuation of Cilicia cleared the Turkish left, but the Greeks on the Eski-Shehr-Afium line still confronted the Turkish center and the Allies in Constantinople still confronted the Turkish right. Meanwhile, the British command in the capital executed in a lesser degree the same climb-down as the French had made with respect to Angora. As a result of the Turkish victory on the Sakaria River, the Turkish deportees on Malta were exchanged at Ineboli on the Black Sea coast for British prisoners held in Anatolia. So Rauf Bey came back to Angora.

No Turk has been a greater lover of the British than Rauf Bey (Rauf is of Circassian and Albanian blood, but politically he is a Turk and unlike most Turks his foreign language is English instead of French). He had applied to the British Embassy in 1914 for help in keeping his country neutral, but no reply had been given him. He had applied to Admiral Calthorpe in 1918 for an armistice, but that armistice led to the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Greek occupation of Smyrna. He had acted in good faith upon an intimation from