On July 22, the Royalist Greek command transferred 20,000 Old Greek troops from its lines behind Smyrna to the Chatalja lines in Eastern Thrace for a move on Constantinople itself, a move which the Allied Governments vetoed. It replaced them behind Smyrna with raw Anatolian Greek levies and on July 30, “autonomy under the guarantee of the Greek Army” was proclaimed upon “Ionia.” This radically changed the military situation, but Fevzi Pasha who was now ready at Angora, was ordered by his Government to withhold action pending news from Fethy Bey. In Paris, Fethy Bey had been well received but when he crossed to London late in July, Lord Curzon’s engagement with him was cancelled and it was only after protests were made on his behalf that Sir William Tyrrell of the Foreign Office received him. Sir William, however, was not empowered to discuss terms of peace and on August 11, Fethy Bey left London for Rome, stopping in Paris long enough to wire the news of his reception in London to Angora. The solution of the Smyrna deadlock was now committed to Fevzi Pasha.
At dawn on August 26, Ismet Pasha attacked the Greek position before Afium-Karahissar. The secrecy which had marked the re-mobilization and re-equipment of the Turkish Armies throughout, had been maintained to the last and Ismet Pasha found the Greeks wholly unprepared. They abandoned Afium and Kutahia and endeavored to stand on September 1 before Ushak, but on September 2, Turkish cavalry drove into Ushak through and over the Greeks, swept up General Tricoupis and his entire staff, and escaped to their own lines. The rest was easy. The distance from Ushak to Smyrna is 160 miles, but the Greeks covered it in eight days, abandoning everything but their rifles, living off the country and stopping only long enough to wreak their last revenge on the villages through which they fled. On September 5, they began streaming into Smyrna and nothing speaks more highly of Fevzi Pasha’s staff work than the fact that all branches of his Army succeeded in keeping pace with them. On September 9, advance Turkish units entered Smyrna. Meanwhile, a secondary attack in the north had been launched against Biledjik on August 30, the Greeks evacuated Eski-Shehr on September 2 and by September 12, their stragglers were crossing from Mudania and Panderma to Eastern Thrace.
From the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States, the Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna shook the world. Islam which had been staggered by the Greek occupation in 1919, threw itself into rejoicing with “our brother Turk.” Christendom which had passed over the Greek occupation in silence, was as staggered by the Turkish re-occupation as if one of the Commandments had dropped out of the Decalogue. Of the three elements which were present in Smyrna, Armenians, Greeks and Turks (to mention them in alphabetical order), American churchmen assumed that it was the Turks who started the fire which razed part of Smyrna town within a week after the re-occupation. As for the Turks themselves, budding Turkish linguists greeted the news from Smyrna with shouts of “Finish imperialisme!”
Only the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek occupation of Eastern Thrace in the Allied rear, now confronted Fevzi Pasha. On September 16, Mr. Lloyd George issued his call to the British Dominions to rally to the defense of “the freedom of the Straits.” Doubtless Mr. Lloyd George knew what he meant by the phrase, but while Soviet Russia and Turkey had repeatedly and publicly defined it, Mr. Lloyd George had refrained from any public definition of it. More was involved, however, than “the freedom of the Straits” in the manifesto of September 16. That manifesto was a direct descendant of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, with the Greek fait accompli across the Straits in process of collapse, the now exposed British command of the Straits and the Black Sea was all that remained of the vast territories which the collapse of Czarist Russia had vacated before an aggressive British imperialism.
On September 30, Mr. Lloyd George sent General Harington, Allied Commander-in-Chief in Constantinople, a six-hour ultimatum ordering the Turkish forces to withdraw from contact with the British lines behind Chanak. If that ultimatum had been served, it would have precipitated an Anglo-Turkish war and with British reinforcements already streaming to the Straits, it is difficult to see with what other purpose it could have been dispatched from London. Instead of serving it, however, General Harington dropped it into his pocket and went to Mudania on October 3 with his Allied colleagues to negotiate an armistice with Ismet Pasha. At dawn on October 11, the Mudania armistice was signed, the Allies agreeing to evacuate the Greeks from Eastern Thrace immediately and to return it to Turkey up to the Maritza River, admitting the Turkish civil administration, supported by a force of 8,000 gendarmes, within a period of thirty days after the Greek evacuation.
On October 19, Mr. Lloyd George who might have written the Mudania armistice in ink instead of in blood, handed his resignation to the King. In Mr. Bonar Law’s Government, however, Lord Curzon remained at the Foreign Office. Preparations were now made for a peace conference, beginning at Lausanne on November 13, for the winding up of hostilities between the Allies and Turkey and between Turkey and Greece. Invitations were issued to, among others, the old Ottoman Government in Constantinople to send delegates to the conference. That Government, from the Sultan-Caliph down, had been stripped of actual authority long before by the Allied occupation of the old capital, and the Grand National Assembly speedily put an end to its technical existence. On November 1, the Assembly reiterated its previous declaration that “the form of government based on personal sovereignty in Constantinople” had ceased to exist on March 16, 1920, adding that “the Caliphate belongs to the Ottoman dynasty and the Grand National Assembly will nominate him of the dynasty who is the most upright and wise in knowledge and character. The Turkish nation is the supporting power of the Caliphate.”
On the morning of November 4, the Constantinople Cabinet handed in its resignation to the Caliph-Sultan and at noon Rafet Pasha took over the administration of Constantinople as one of the provincial capitals of the new Turkish State. In the early hours of November 17, the Caliph-Sultan fled on a British battleship to Malta and on the following day the Grand National Assembly at Angora elected the heir presumptive, Abdul Medjid Effendi, to the Caliphate of Islam. Turkish nationalism was continuing to surmount that Old Turkish conservatism which had helped to wreck the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. As for Islam in India, such was the siege-encircled secrecy in which Turkish nationalism had developed that the end of its historic Ottoman theocracy fell upon it as a severe blow, but it stuck loyally to “our brother Turk.” As for the Emperor of India, he was uncertain whether the seat of the Caliphate was Constantinople or Mecca. The ex-Sherif Hussein had two sons perched on precarious thrones, Feisal at Bagdad and Abdullah at Amman, and had himself been referred to as “Supreme Pontiff of the Islamic world and temporal ruler of Arabia.”
GENERAL MOUHEDDIN PASHA