“Just what do you mean by your own problem?”
“You have seen the country, you know the condition in which Turkey is. Our villages, our towns, our communications, all need to be built anew from the ground up. We have had a good Army in times past. I don’t believe there has been a better Army in Europe. But we hope soon to be able to demobilize and then our real work will begin. We shall have a potentially rich country on our hands and we shall have the right which we have not had recently, to do what we can with it. We want to make it a country worthy of its name, we want to give it not only the best its own civilization offers it but the best we can take from other civilizations. To that end, we shall welcome the help of others but in the very nature of our task, any help we secure from others must be subordinated to our own efforts. If we can not succeed, nobody else can.”
“Do you think you will succeed?”
“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.”
When my time was up, I left him and walked back in silence to my rooms. I dispatched the aged Armenian maid after tea, took off my shoes and donned my slippers. I felt somewhat as a man does when he has seen a great cavalry charge and has returned to his billet and taken his boots off. I became aware finally of the squeak of ox-carts beneath my windows. A long string of them was passing on its 300-mile trek up from the coast to the Army bases in the interior. The air was filled with their slow screaming squeak, a squeak which with infinite deliberation removed the skin from every note in the chromatic scale, the squeak of wooden axles daubed with tar to tickle the musical palates of a team of oxen. Each cart, a mere wooden platform mounted on wooden wheels, bore a tall mound of hay for the oxen and beneath the hay the rope-handled ends of two or four or six new wooden boxes protruded, the number of boxes depending on the calibre of the shells within. Most of the drivers were Turkish peasant women, jacketed and pantalooned, their feet shod in rope-bound woollens, their faces and hands reddened by exposure. Dead men’s fathers and sons and brothers in the Army, widows and dead men’s daughters behind the Army—but still the rope-handled boxes squeaked up from the sea….
It is out of the dumb stubborn strength of this peasantry that the Turkish military tradition has been fashioned in centuries past. But can the Turks direct this strength from their native military tradition into a new and Western economic tradition? This is the question mark which hangs over the Turkish problem today and Kemal knows it.
“Do you think you will succeed?” I had asked him.
“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what sort of beginning we have made.”