Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/77

 released the vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place their own Christian theocracies.

Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and the revolution degenerating for the time being into a mere coup d'etat. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War. Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as military attache where he joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to Bulgaria.