Inë-Onü was the first evidence the Greeks had of what Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha had been doing at Angora, and Athens began feverishly to increase its forces in order to administer a “knockout” before Ismet Pasha’s command should be built up into a regular Army. Athens was ready by July and three Armies, starting from the southern, center and northern fronts, were ordered to converge on Kutahia, about half-way between Eski-Shehr and Afium. The operations developed according to plan, Kutahia fell, Eski-Shehr was evacuated under the threat of encirclement and, although Ismet Pasha pounded at the exhausted Greeks in Eski-Shehr for ten days, the Greeks held and Ismet Pasha withdrew to the Sakaria River, covering Angora itself. The Greek command had won the railway junctions of Eski-Shehr and Afium and now possessed the bend of railway line which connects Constantinople and Smyrna. The Turkish command had lost its interior railway line and the only connection between Angora and Konia was now a carriage road over which the two towns were five days apart.
Still lured by the possibility of a “knockout,” the Greek command now rested for a month and then resumed its march. Toward the end of August, it re-established contact with the Turks on the Sakaria River, where Field Marshal Mustapha Kemal Pasha had taken command in person. At Angora the civil Government had made preparations for evacuation to Caesarea, crowds of refugees had thronged the already overcrowded town, and occupants of larger dwellings were dispossessed to make room for military hospitals.
The Battle of the Sakaria River which ensued, was another Inë-Onü but on a larger scale. It lasted three weeks and even Kemal Pasha himself was wounded in the course of it, although the only announcement which was made of his injury in Angora was a brief communique to the effect that he had “fallen from his horse.” Attempting to encircle the Turkish left, the Greek command drove south across an area of desert but Kemal pulled down his forces to meet them. The Greeks drove inland forty miles in a vain endeavor to find the Turkish left, and finally changing their plan of battle, threw themselves against the Turkish lines in a straight frontal engagement, some of the Greek attacks driving all the way through and then being held up by the failure of flanking regiments to follow them. Heavy Turkish counter-attacks finally made it plain that the Greek command had underestimated the Turkish strength and that the long Greek lines of communication exposed it to the risk of a disorderly retreat. By the middle of September, the Greek command began pulling back its forces, burning Turkish villages as they went. By the first of October, the Greeks were back in their old positions covering the railway junctions at Eski-Shehr and Afium and the Turkish recovery of Smyrna became only a matter of time. By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief’s representatives in Angora, compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the Near East Relief’s headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Smyrna.
The Turkish victory on the banks of the Sakaria radically changed the political complexion of the Near and Middle East. For 200 years, the West had been breaking down the old Ottoman Empire, but on the Sakaria River it encountered the Turk himself and when it touched the Turk the tide of history turned. History will one day find in this obscure engagement on the Sakaria one of the decisive battles of our era.
The French Foreign Office which had been waiting on the outer rim of events ever since the Mudros armistice deprived the French Army of its anticipated sole command in Constantinople, now dispatched M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon to Angora, where he negotiated the Franco-Turkish peace agreement of October 20, 1921. Although the covering letter from Yusuf Kemal Bey, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Government, contains the only reference to “economic preference” which marked the result of the Franklin-Bouillon negotiations, the French Foreign Office probably hoped in this agreement not only to put an end to the expensive state of war which the French command at Beirut was facing in Cilicia, but also to salvage the Perier railway concession which had been the subject of French negotiations with the old Ottoman Government in 1914. A French loan of £22,000,000 had been offered the old Government in February of that year of which £16,000,000 was paid in the following April, the French Perier group taking in return a concession for 1,800 miles of railway line in northern and eastern Anatolia. The loan, however, had never been completed, the concession had never been ratified by the old Parliament and it seems quite probable that, even if it had been, the war would have cancelled it. But peace in Cilicia had become an urgent necessity, for the Turkish forces were slowly pushing the Franco-Armenian Armies back toward the sea. To secure peace, as well as any other objectives which M. Franklin-Bouillon may have had in mind, the French Foreign Office surrendered to Turkey a long strip of territory, beginning with Cilicia and running east to the Mosul province, a French company, however, maintaining the right of operating the Bagdad Railway from the port of Mersina in Cilicia to its eastern terminus on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia.
News of this surrender so embittered the French Army that General Dufieux, the French commandant in Cilicia, left Adana immediately for Beirut, leaving behind him only subordinate French officers to carry out the evacuation. It threw the Armenians in Cilicia into a panic. In preparing their independent Armenian State under the French aegis, they had taken a drastic revenge on the Turks in Cilicia and there was doubtless ample ground for their fears that the Turks would continue the ugly business. In order to assuage their fears, the Turkish Government proclaimed a blanket amnesty, exempted them from military service which it had a legal right to claim from them, exempted them from the forty percent requisitions which it exacted from all other Turkish subjects in the country, and guaranteed their security in the strongest terms it could use. To back up these guarantees, it dispatched two of the best men it had available, Muheddin Pasha as military governor of the re-occupied territory and Hamid Bey, who has been mentioned above in connection with Samsun, as political officer. Muheddin Pasha is a representative of the finest type of old Ottoman Army officer. He was one of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s teachers in the War Academy at Constantinople and he has been introduced by Kemal Pasha as “the man who gave us all our ideas of liberty.” He had nothing to do with the Armenian deportations of 1915 or with the Enver Government which ordered them; under the Hamidian regime, he had been exiled four times and twice condemned to death, and during the war he served as Ottoman commander in the Yemen which was about as far from the capital as Enver Pasha could have sent him.
The Turkish re-occupation was timed to begin Dec. 1, 1921, and to be completed by Jan. 4, 1922. On November 20, Muheddin Pasha and Hamid Bey published a proclamation in the Turkish newspaper, Yeni Adana, which was designed to assuage the Armenians’ fears. On November 22, they met a deputation of Armenian leaders in an upper room of the Yenidje railway station, and M. Franklin-Bouillon reached Yenidje later in the day from Angora to repeat their re-assurances. On November 26, they motored to Mersina where some 40,000 Armenians were waiting for ships and met a deputation of 100 Armenian notables in the Government building. On November 29, M. Franklin-Bouillon returned to Mersina alone and held a final conference with the Armenians. Since they had once been Ottoman subjects, the Turkish Government had a probable right in law to forbid their departure from Turkish soil, but it had become clear that no guarantees it could offer would persuade them to remain voluntarily and the Government refrained from keeping them involuntarily. Most of them went to Syria to live on the charity of the Near East Relief at Alexandretta, only a few miles away, and their abandoned homes in Cilicia were put into the hands of a Turkish committee appointed by Hamid Bey to be kept for them for a year’s time. Most of Cilicia was in a devastated condition and there was an appalling amount of work to be done in repairing the ravages of war, but the bulk of the Armenians settled down to live in idleness on American charity at the old Alexandretta barracks.
It may be that some means will yet be discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history in the eastern provinces and five centuries in Cilicia; it may be that some way will yet be opened of transferring the semi-autonomy of the old Ermeni community from a religious to a territorial basis, but with all possible good will, the discovery of it or of the faintest possibility of it has proven beyond the feeble powers of the present writer. If the Armenian problem had ever been really understood in the United States, certainly no sane American would ever have meddled with it. The past, however, is beyond recall. In the tragic position to which the Armenians have been reduced today, three courses suggest themselves as being open to Americans in the future:
First, Congress may declare war on Turkey and by dispatching an expeditionary force of a strength of possibly 200,000 men, we may conquer Cilicia and install an Armenian State which will stand as long as our Army or some other Western Army remains in occupation and no longer; and by so doing, we shall succeed in righting one wrong by committing a greater wrong. Happily, this course is out of the question.
Second, we may continue to support the Armenians with charity and to insist upon “minority rights” in Turkey as distinct from the rights of Turkey’s majorities. This course we have followed consistently since 1918, and it has only succeeded in stiffening the Turks, pauperizing the Armenians, and preventing that peace which is the very first essential of both.