Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/31

 continued to fire questions at him until I felt that his brain had turned, had rushed down from its distance and was sitting intently behind those fixed blue eyes, staring out at its questioner:

"Suppose Turkey's Western population leaves the country en masse when it becomes certain that the Capitulations are ended?"

"The West can help us or hinder us greatly," he said, "but it ought to be remembered that we Turks have our own problem to work out in Turkey."

"Just what do you mean by your own problem?"

"You have seen the country, you know the condition in which Turkey is. Our villages, our towns, our communications, all need to be built anew from the ground up. We have had a good Army in times past. I don't believe there has been a better Army in Europe. But we hope soon to be able to demobilize and then our real work will begin. We shall have a potentially rich country on our hands and we shall have the right which we have not had recently, to do what we can with it. We want to make it a country worthy of its name, we want to give it not only the best its own civilization offers it but the best we can take from other civilizations. To that end, we shall welcome the help of others but in the very nature of our task, any help we secure from others must be subordinated to our own efforts. If we can not succeed, nobody else can."

"Do you think you will succeed?"

"If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made."

When my time was up, I left him and walked back in silence to my rooms. I dispatched the aged Armenian maid after tea, took off my shoes and