How Goes Turkey?

EASTERN THEATRE How Goes Turkey?

Aside from the celebrated Italian question (see p. 20), two key questions overhang the Allied position in the Near East. There the Allies have perhaps 800,000 men standing to arms (and reinforcements coming every week) to plug the southeastern hole in their blockade of Germany. How about the Arabs? Will the Turks stay bought?

The conservative, antiwar, but strongly pro-Ally New York Herald Tribune has a raven-haired reporter named Sonia Tomara touring the Near East. Most of last week she spent at Beirut, Syria, after inspecting Turkey and the Balkans. Reporter Tomara last week offered answers to the two key Near East questions. On No. 1 she reported flatly: "The Pan-Arab movement has, for the present at least, given way to a desire to see the Allies win the war. The Arabs understand only too well that the Nazis consider the Semites an inferior race."

With an anecdote Reporter Tomara answered Question No. 2. Proceeding by bus from Ankara to Beirut, she was delayed by a breakdown in the middle of the salt desert of Konya. From the hovels of a dirt-poor Turkish village, the populace swarmed around. Out stepped "an elderly man whose head was wrapped in a dirty rag--possibly a turban, the wearing of which long ago had been banned by the late Kamal Ataturk. The old man, who had been taken prisoner by the Russians in the last war, addressed me in primitive Russian, filling out gaps in his sentence with childlike gestures.

" 'We have a new war, but now the Turks, French and English are brothers,' he said. He thrust out two fingers of one hand and one of the other, brought them together and continued: The Alleman [Germans] and Russ are the enemy. We brothers are a big wall together. Alleman kaput!' "The crowd around him roared with laughter at 'Alleman kaput,' signifying Germany would be beaten.

"The feeling of the lowly peasants was not much different from that of residents of Ankara, although Konya and Ankara appeared to be separated by an age."

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