Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/235

 *street the band moved into sight with a withered little mad woman dancing in her rags beside it. She was fairly well known in Angora. They said that her father and two brothers had been killed in the Balkan Wars, her husband and three sons had been killed in the Great War, and her youngest son had been killed at Inë-Onü. But however these things might have been, she was dancing down the street beside the heavy-shod bandsmen, dancing as lightly as the snowflakes to the crashing rhythms of the Mustapha Kemal Pasha March.

In the wake of the band came the tramping shuffle of a long column of soldiers, stolid men, heavily accoutred, with khaki kalpaks, their rifles tipped with new bayonets. They marched away down the broad road which led past the Assembly building to the railway station, a wooden building with the single word "Angora" in Turkish and English script on its sign-board. A low pall of wood-*smoke, belched from the stacks of half a dozen locomotives, hung over the railway yard. A long column of ox-carts was discharging its cargo of new rope-handled wooden boxes into freight cars. With the band playing, the column of soldiers broke ranks and scrambled up into another freight train alongside the station platform. They entrained within a half-hour, a rattle of couplings ran along the length of the train, and it moved out of the station toward the west, where the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar

On Feb. 21, 1921, the Allied Governments had received delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora in London in an effort to reconcile the