“You can easily realize that under these conditions there is very little social life. Besides, the work undertaken is too strenuous, the people here are too much occupied with their duties--and really in earnest about accomplishing them as well as they can--to indulge in social life. Furthermore there are very few representatives of the fair sex in Angora, and social life without ladies is not possible. Most of the women here are villagers or else nurses of the Red Crescent, Turkish relief workers and ladies otherwise occupied in assisting their husbands, fathers or brothers in the patriotic task they have undertaken. There are no women of leisure, no hostess who has enough time to entertain. It can be truthfully said that every Turkish woman now in Angora is a little Joan of Arc and the quarters being so inadequate most of the women live together and sleep together just as their men are obliged to live and sleep together. Everyone here works grimly with a definite purpose and faces the realities confronting the Cyclopean work of recreating a Nation. “The lack of social intercourse does not however detract from the interest of the place. The sight of the streets alone is most interesting and edifying. Everyone is so busy and there are so many people here that it is hardly possible to walk leisurely in the streets during the rush hours of the day. One is taken up and carried by the crowd. And the crowd is the most diversified and picturesque that one can see in any place, not even barring the proverbial bridge in Constantinople. You see, volunteers of all kinds have rushed here not only from Anatolia, but from every Turkish country, every Turkish village of the world and even from the most diversified Muslim countries of Asia and Africa. It is a real Babel, but of costumes not of languages: every one speaks Turkish. Turkish Anatolian peasants, with baggy trousers, wide blue belts and thin turbans over their fez, fraternize with Tartars and Kirghiz of Turkestan. Azerbeidjanian and Caucasian Turks, with tight-fitting black coats and enormous black astrakan kolpaks on their heads--runaways from Bolshevik Russia--are discussing the principles of real democracy as applied to Nationalist Turkey and comparing them with the so-called democracy of Soviet lands. Muslim Chinamen and Hindoos are talking over the future of Turkey and Islam. All the nations of Asia intermingle here and most of them have official missions in Angora: Embassies from Afghanistan, Beluchistan, Bokhara, Khiva and from the different new Republics of Turkestan, duly accredited representatives from Persia and Azerbeidjan. The quota from Africa is also very large and while there are no diplomatic missions from African countries--for the simple reason that all African countries are colonies--many are the Fellahs from Egypt, the Algerians and Moroccans and even the Muslim negroes of North Africa who can be seen in the streets.