From the window of the antechamber I saw the Pasha arrive, attended only by one aide-de-camp. There is, of course, absolutely no foundation for the stories that he is even more strictly guarded than Lenin, among a people who trust and love him!
It is not necessary to see M. Kemal Pasha to realise that he is the greatest man in Turkey to-day, quite apart from his actual achievements. He has, indeed, accomplished miracles; but it is rather the universal attitude of the people by which one measures the man. I feel that my host’s regard for me was definitely increased when I had had lunch with Mustapha Kemal. The servants announce the “Pasha, Pasha”—no need for a more precise name.
Should one hold him greater as statesman, soldier, or orator? since he is past-master in all three aspects. Personally, I am more grateful to him who prevents war than to the conqueror. It is as a statesman that I met him, and I will therefore first consider his political ideals and work.
Great events create great men, and it is but once in the life of a nation that situations so grave as that which found Mustapha Kemal are ever likely to arise. He rose out of the terror of the Hamidian régime, the years that followed, and the humiliation of occupied Smyrna. It needed, however, the suffering and sorrow to which all reformers must serve their apprenticeship to mould his character and to bring him where he now stands. It was the long-suffering martyrdom one saw in the face of his late mother that forced him to realise what he must do, and he has never faltered from the goal.
Only here, beside them, can one understand all the Government has had to do in Angora, and see for oneself how the whole flock still look to this one man for courage and inspiration. Had he lost faith in the goal or in his capacity to reach it, all would have been lost. “Freedom for Turkey or death for the Turks” has been his motto throughout the years.
I suppose that, however often one may proclaim it, they will not believe who have not seen, a new Turkey is born into the world. It is, indeed, idle to weep over the days that are dead and gone, when the Turk counted for nothing in his own land; when the foreigner ruled the roost, and ambassadors were princes! The new Turk has arrived; the member of a new nation. No important demand was made at Lausanne by Turkey that any self-respecting people could be asked to forgo.
And yet the Powers are still attempting to treat with “old” Turkey! We have no longer to maintain our officious, if well-meant, interference on behalf of disloyal minorities; to insist, par exemple, that Christians shall be exempted from military service, as America never exempted her negro population.
THE GHAZI MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA.
President of the Grand National Assembly, Angora.
(Signed portrait presented to the Author).
p. 160
No wonder, again, M. Kemal has been more than tempted to wish (what, for no other reason, he could desire) to abolish religion altogether, after the imposition upon Constantinople of that arch-intriguer the Greek Patriarch! When France and Italy recognised the “State” Church for the parasite that may, at any moment, suck up its life-blood, they cast the Church aside. Confronted at the very outset by a precisely similar danger, Mustapha Kemal at once cut off the Khalifat from the Assembly and considerably limited the power of the Hodjas, a far more difficult operation than French disestablishment. Yet we expect him a second time to expose himself to the intrigues of a Greek Patriarch!