The refugee problem became acute immediately after the retreat. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Circassians, and Armenians, and a large number of non-Kemalist Turks fled pell-mell to the coast, overcrowded Chios, Mytilene, and Samos, and flowed over to Athens and Saloniki in a never ceasing stream. To these were added refugees from Thrace. Then came the Christians expelled from the Black Sea littoral. The Turks had retained, and deported into the interior for labor battalions, the able-bodied men and boys. The Greek refugee situation developed much the same as the earlier Armenian problem--countless thousands of women, children, and old people, incapable of earning their own living, even were there a chance to do so. As virtually all the Christian population of Asia Minor and Thrace had fled or had been exiled, Greece within a few weeks saw her population increased by between 1,200,000 and 1,300,000 wholly dependent immigrants, bringing disease with their poverty. They came at the beginning of winter. All needed shelter, food, clothing, bedding, and medical attention. The problem was appalling, and it still threatens to overwhelm Greece in the summer of 1923. There is little hope of these refugees’ being able to return to their homes. How can a country, not self-supporting, bankrupt, and without credit abroad, take care of a 20 per cent increase in its population, not of able-bodied men, but of dependents? Charity, notably that administered by the Near East Relief, has kept the refugees from starving and freezing. It cannot continue indefinitely, however, and very many Greeks believe that salvation lies in a new test at arms with the Turks. They are by no means convinced of the military superiority of the Angora Nationalists, unless they are helped, as they were last time, from the outside. The Greeks still have their fleet, which gives them mastery of the sea. If not interfered with, they can blockade the Turks. The lesson of the protracted and fruitless negotiations at Lausanne seems to be that force alone counts for anything in international relations. Throughout the discussions the attitude of the Turks was that of defiance, and only military threats brought them to a compromise. The best argument Venizelos had was the fact that 150,000 Greeks were still under arms, most of them in Western Thrace, with their morale restored, and ready to try again. This prevented the Turks from prodding him too hard, and this alone made the Entente Powers willing to consider that, despite the debacle of 1922, there might still be a promising future for Hellenism, and some profit to be had for friends of the Greeks. CHAPTER XXII THE TURKISH NATIONALIST MOVEMENT