Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/25

 straight eyebrows, and there is no waste space between the eyebrows and the eyes themselves. "The Pasha" is reputed to have occasional fits of temper which reveal themselves in a noticeable squint in the pupils of his eyes, but during all the time I talked with him that afternoon, those eyes of pale blue fixed themselves on me and never left me.

There is a story of some famous German general who is reputed to have smiled only twice in his life, once when his mother-in-law died and once when he heard that the Swedish General Staff had referred to certain military works outside Stockholm as a fortress. Applied to Kemal, the story would hardly hold true for he has the gift of making himself genuinely pleasant when he cares to exercise it. I can speak of it only in connection with the handful of Westerners who have lived in Angora during the last four years. Turkey has been not only Turkish but desperately Turkish during these last years, yet no public celebration of its victories has occurred in Angora without the handful of Westerners in the town attending and without Kemal himself making an opportunity to receive them upon its conclusion. On these occasions, they have been received with a sensitive cordiality hardly understandable by those Westerners at home to whom it has never occurred that nations are born, not in debating societies, but in the mud and blood of suffering.

Kemal is, however, a professional soldier, dismissed from the old Ottoman Army by the Damad Ferid Ministry in Constantinople and now occupying a politico-military position at the head of the new Turkish Government. He has brought to Angora the blunt directness of the soldier rather than