Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/34

 officers' school at Monastir and the War Academy at Constantinople finally graduated him, a head-*strong youth of 22, into the Army in 1902 with the rank of lieutenant. He had hardly reached the War Academy from Monastir before his adolescent mind became tainted by the political ferment with which the school was secretly permeated. A copy of the forbidden play Watan (The Fatherland) fell into his hands. Abdul Hamid had caused every known copy of it to be confiscated and burned; he had forced its author, despite his very high place in modern Turkish literature, to flee into exile; he had driven out of the capital every Ottoman subject whom his spies suspected of having read it. But Watan gave the young Kemal his first taste of Western ideas and made him secretly a Young Turk and a bitter opponent of Abdul Hamid, which at the time was a rather ridiculous thing to be.

Abdul Hamid was an able Easterner who maintained his grip on his country by such a system of espionage that the life and liberty of no Ottoman subject was safe who was remotely suspected of having heard of the French Revolution, a system of espionage which could not keep Western ideas out of the capital but which could, and did, keep them underground. The military tradition of the country continued to attract its best brains into the Army but the network of espionage which radiated from Yildiz Kiosk had the effect of giving the Army a sort of dual existence. On the surface, it continued to be a military organism, the trustee of an Eastern military tradition, but beneath the surface it became a ferment of forbidden Western ideas and the example of Nihilism in Russia which