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horrific, as many as a quarter million. Bravery, loss, and the incompetence of command are
celebrated in Tennyson's poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
'Forward, the Light Brigade
Charge for the guns,' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Someone had blunder'd
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred. [167]
WHAT IS ATATÜRK'S LEGACY?
At the end of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its colonies
and imposed harsh reparations. The Allies' score with Germany's ally, Turkey, was equally
harsh. Under the Treaty of Sevres (1920), the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. Britain
and France established protectorates over Lebanon, Palestine, the Arabian peninsula, the
Transjordan, and a broad sweep of North Africa.
As the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul held sway over vast territories from
the Near East (Turkey, Arabia, and Palestine), westward to Morocco, and in Europe from
Greece and the Balkans to Hungary. It was an empire that lasted almost 600 years, falling
to British forces at the end of the First World War. With war's end, the sultanate was ab-
olished, and a new Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal, moved the capital of the Republic of
Turkey from Istanbul to a better-defended place, an ancestral home of the Turks, Ankara.
As herald of a new Turkey, Kemal announced the abolition of the sultanate on Novem-
ber 1, 1922. [168] (The last sultan sailed for Malta on a British warship.) Kemal led the new
Republic of Turkey for fifteen years. He secularized the Republic, made education a gov-
ernment enterprise, replaced Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, abolished Islamic law and
replaced it with European-based laws, granted women's rights, and forbade the wearing of
Ottoman clothes (robes, turban, the fez). He changed the name of the country to Turkiye,
 
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