No armies were so decisively defeated in the closing months of the World War as those of Turkey. The British retrieved their reverses in Mesopotamia, while General Allenby, in the Palestinian campaign, succeeded in striking a death-blow to Turkish military domination over the Arabic-speaking portions of the Ottoman Empire. When it was realized at Constantinople that Germany had come to the end of her resources, Talaat and Enver, who had been in the saddle throughout the war, resigned and got away. A new cabinet immediately entered into negotiations for an armistice, but tried to delay capitulating in order that Turkey might have the advantage of the conditional surrender Germany was manœuvering to make. This proved to be impossible. On October 30, 1918, the Sultan’s delegates agreed at Mudros to Allied occupation of the Straits and Constantinople, as well as of the Taurus tunnel system on the Bagdad Railway, and to the immediate demobilization of the Turkish army, the surrender of the fleet, the withdrawal of Turkish armies from the Caucasus, Persia, and Cilicia, and the capitulation of Turkish garrisons and officers with indigenous troops in Arabia, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Tripolitania. After the armistice British armies entered the Caucasus, penetrated Mesopotamia to Mosul, and passed through Syria into Cilicia. Entente fleets appeared in the Bosphorus; garrisons were disembarked for Constantinople; and Allied contingents took possession of the Dardanelles forts. The British extended their control from the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus along the Anatolian Railway to Eski Sheïr. A prompt peace settlement, such as was imposed upon Germany, would have compelled the Turks to yield to every demand of the Entente Powers. But, as we have seen elsewhere, suspicions and rivalries of the Entente Powers delayed the presentation of a treaty to Turkey. Nearly two years passed before the Turks were forced to sign the Treaty of Sèvres. In the meantime, the Entente Powers had invited Greece to occupy Smyrna and to drive the Turks out of Thrace. The Greek expedition to Asia Minor met with opposition from the beginning, and to break it down the Greeks were gradually drawn into the interior of the country. Syria and Cilicia were handed over to the French, and the British were compelled to abandon the Caucasus and northern Persia to Soviet Russia. Before the summer of 1920 there was already a wide divergence of opinion on the Near Eastern question among the Entente Powers, and the Turks, under Mustafa Kemal Pasha, had reorganized an army and were defying the Sultan’s authority in the interior of Asia Minor. These significant changes did not deter the Entente Powers, however, from rejecting the pleas of the Turks for mitigation of the peace terms in much the same language they had used to Germany a year before.