General allenby’s great break-through in Palestine had thrown Mustapha Kemal Pasha back to Adana in Cilicia, where a cypher telegram from Constantinople told him that Rauf Bey was on his way to Mudros to sign an armistice with the British. It was the end of the world for Kemal.

He returned to the capital to find an Anglo-French command quartered in Pera and the entire Constantinople area under effective military occupation. None of the twenty-five clauses of the Mudros armistice seems to have authorized such an occupation. The only mention of Constantinople which occurred in the armistice was a stipulation in clause 4 that Allied prisoners of war and interned Armenians were “to be collected in Constantinople and handed over unconditionally to the Allies.” Allied “use of all ship repair facilities at all Turkish ports and arsenals” was provided in clause 9 and clause 11 stipulated that “wireless telegraphy and cable stations” were “to be controlled by the Allies, Turkish Government messages excepted.” In accordance with these clauses, Allied officers had been assigned to all Turkish ports for control and intelligence purposes. Clause 21 had provided for “an Allied representative to be attached to the Turkish Ministry of Supplies in order to safeguard Allied interests,” but the attachment of an Allied representative would seem to be no more a synonym for military occupation than the use of ship repair facilities or the control of wireless and cable stations.

Allied occupation of Batum was provided in clause 15 and Allied occupation of Baku was mentioned. “Allied occupation of Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts” was specifically stipulated in clause 1, but is the Pera suburb of Constantinople one of the “Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts”? “Secure access to the Black Sea” was stipulated in clause 1 and clause 7 gave the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” But no such situation had arisen at Constantinople and it is difficult to imagine how it could have arisen with the capital lying under the guns of as great a fleet of battleships as lay in the Bosphorus. It is true that the mere appearance of Allied men of war off the city so affected its Greek minority as to bring about a most explosive situation, of which Rauf Bey had warned Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. But a military occupation seems to be quite a different matter from the temporary landing of troops to restrain the Greeks. It is also true that Constantinople was a very useful supply base for Denikin, yet the terms of the Mudros armistice are down in black and white, with Admiral Calthorpe’s signature attached to them, and they do not appear to make an Allied occupation of the capital a legal proceeding.

Rauf Bey had made it plain to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros that no Ottoman Government could submit to the re-imposition of the Capitulations. Under the occupation, the Allies re-imposed them. None of the Allied Governments had recognized their abrogation, but the Mudros armistice was a military and not a civil instrument. Under military law, occupying Armies are authorized to administer only the existing body of enemy civil law and usage, pending the permanent disposition of their occupied enemy territory in the terms of peace. The Mudros armistice contained no mention of the Capitulations or of any other civil matter at issue between the Allied Governments and the Ottoman Government, and their re-imposition during a state of armistice does not seem to have been a legal proceeding.

When Mustapha Kemal Pasha reached the capital, he discovered that the Parliament had been prorogued, the Izzet Government had fallen, and Damad Ferid Pasha had been sent for by the Sultan to form a new Government. The Sultan had left Dolma Bagtsche for Abdul Hamid’s late home at Yildiz Kiosk, and such sound reforms as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 had succeeded in making, the Allies had speedily unmade. In its golden age, the Ottoman Empire had been broadly tolerant, but during its last two centuries of agony the Christian imperialisms of the West had turned its tolerance to poison and since 1908 its own Christian communities had helped to keep the poison circulating in its veins. Its Christian military occupants now re-injected as much of the poison as it had succeeded in throwing out, and this in its capital, the very heart of the country.

With its Parliament prorogued and its press stifled by a military censorship, Turkish opinion was drifting leaderless into confusion. Opposition parties are apt to suffer in time of war and the late Enver Government had so thoroughly broken up its Opposition that the Damad Ferid Government no longer commanded confidence. The intrigues of three Allies, each of them cultivating Turkish support, added to the confusion. Western concession hunters and the Levantinism with which the capital stank, trailed the slime of money over the scene.

Across this unlovely landscape, the Phanar’s break with the Ottoman Government fell like a thunderbolt. Rauf Bey had surrendered at Mudros to an Emperor of India purged of his Russian alliance, but it now became apparent that the Venizelist Government at Athens had succeeded to the place in the Anglo-Russian entente which Russia had vacated. Rauf had applied to Admiral Calthorpe for an Anglo-Turkish alliance, but it now appeared that no such alliance would be granted and it is easy to imagine what effect this desperate situation, if it had really come upon them, had upon the Turks in the capital. The Phanar had now become openly an enemy in Stamboul itself, the Turkish guard in the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia was heavily reinforced, and a French guard stacked its rifles outside the mosque.

The panic-stricken Turks, still thinking in terms of the Empire, still blind to the great fallen columns about them, launched their Wilsonian League as a bid for new friends. The United States had not declared war against them. The Enver Government had severed diplomatic relations when Washington joined the Allies, but the break had gone no further. Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U. S. N., a naval officer on State Department duty, had occupied the American Embassy in Pera as High Commissioner, restricting his communication with the Ottoman Government to the medium of the Swedish Legation pending the resumption of diplomatic relations. A large colony of Americans had followed him into Constantinople, part of them business men who presently became restive under the tardiness of the boom in materializing, part of them relief workers who discovered to their surprise that Turks have the same number of eyes and ears and legs and arms as the rest of us have. Some of the American colony of which Admiral Bristol was the head, afford this somber narrative a lighter aspect. All our American types were represented in Constantinople—​deep-breathing bishops: apostolic governors of Kansas: “Y” workers whose given names were Fred and Henry and Dick: business men who knew what they wanted and couldn’t get it: courteous and correct Embassy attaches: old missionaries with broken hearts and tight lips: sailors who blew in from Mersina, oiled up and blew out again to Samsun: young and autobiographical Near East Relief workers: college presidents who had lived long in the land and were vaguely concerned about the Capitulations: young lady missionaries with a sweetly simple reliance on “these darling British”: and stern “commissioners” of the Near East Relief on “tours of inspection” who learned from Greeks and Armenians that the worst they had been told of the Turk was quite true. At the head of them all was Admiral Bristol, equipped with a flotilla of American destroyers and charged with the defense of American interests in the Ottoman Empire. He enjoyed what was probably the most difficult American position in all of Europe and in it he proved himself a very tower of American strength.

The colony of which he was the head was divided into two sorts, American business men who looked to the American Embassy for their leadership, and American missionary, educational and relief workers who looked not only to the American Embassy but to the British from the Foreign Office in London down to the British Army in Pera without reminding themselves as frequently as they might have done that the British Army, while one of our most gallant Armies, interests itself, and quite rightly, in the King’s peace and in no other peace.

In the absence of any Parliament to speak for than, a number of the most influential Turks in the capital formed themselves into a delegation from the Wilsonian League and pledged themselves early in 1919 to accept an American mandate over the entire country, provided a definite term, preferably fifteen or twenty years, was named for it. This pledge was communicated to Admiral Bristol and forwarded by him to Washington. If such a mandate would not apply the Westernism of the Fourteen Points to the case of Turkey, it was reasoned, it would at least afford the Turks the time they needed to consider their position.