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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
48 
In Germany, too, there formed after defeat unofficial armies inspired by “national” 
sentiments, one of which fought for about a year in the Baltic region; and in the face 
of humiliating peace terms there were high ranking soldiers who during May and 
June 1919 seriously contemplated the resumption of hostilities and a retreat from the 
allies in the west for resistance to continue from the east. This course was averted 
more narrowly than is commonly remembered by a few clear-sighted persons who 
recognised its futility and danger in the face of allied strength and determination
58
. 
Against Turkey both these components were lacking but the willingness to impose a 
humiliating peace was not correspondingly abated. 
In Ankara a surviving inscription has chanced to preserve for posterity the pithy 
record of his deeds, which the Divine Augustus begins by declaring that at the age of 
nineteen he raised an army and liberated the commonwealth from the domination of 
a faction
59
. In Ankara nineteen centuries later Mustafa Kemal began a considerably 
longer account of a much shorter span of recent history by declaring that on 19 May 
1919 he landed at Samsun. The former document has long been recognised as a 
masterpiece of dissimulation and fraud; the latter has latterly come to be seen less as 
a reliable history of the War of Independence and more as its retrospective rewriting 
for the purpose of enhancing the stature of the author and of vindicating the recent 
purge of erstwhile comrades
60
. 
58
Craig, 424-429 
59
Brunt and Moore, 20 
60
Zürcher 2010, 6-16 

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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
49 
Mustafa Kemal seems in the early days after the armistice to have aimed at a 
position of authority in Istanbul within the official government
61
. Meanwhile the 
ground for a resistance movement had been laid before he set foot in Samsun. The 
CUP, although discredited by defeat and promptly rebranded, continued through its 
membership to have significant influence after the armistice. Whether or not plans 
had been laid before the armistice for continuing resistance to the Allied intentions 
for Turkey, which had been well advertised either through the pronouncement of 
Wilsonian principles or Bolshevik leaks of earlier secret compacts, officers of the 
right persuasion were after it either placed in Anatolian commands by a sympathetic 
War Ministry or directed thither by more clandestine ways
62
. Officers such as Ali 
Fuad and Kâzım Karabekir had preceded Mustafa Kemal to commands in Anatolia
63
and, had Kâzım not pledged his loyalty to Mustafa Kemal when the latter both 
resigned and was dismissed from his official position in July 1919
64
, history might 
have been very different.
Agitation through the foundation, apparently on CUP initiative, of Societies for the 
Defence of National Rights, with Wilsonian principles as stimulus, to proclaim the 
Muslim or Turkish character of particular localities also began very promptly,