This was the summit of their achievement in the Asia Minor Campaign. For days during the battle neither ammunition nor food had reached the front, owing to successful harassment of the Greek lines of communications and raids behind the Greek lines by Turkish cavalry. All the Greek troops were committed to the battle, while fresh Turkish drafts were still arriving throughout the campaign in response to the Nationals mobilization. For all these reasons the impetus of the Greek attack was gone. For a few days there was a lull in the fighting in which neither exhausted army could press an attack. The Greek king Constantine I, who commanded the battle personally, was almost taken prisoner by a Turkish patrol. Astute as ever at the decisive moment, Mustafa Kemal assumed personal command and led a small counter-attack against the Greek left and around the Mount Chal on September 8. The Greek line held and the attack itself achieved a limited military success, but in fear that this presaged a major Turkish effort to outflank their forces as the severity of winter was approaching, Constantine broke off the Greek assault on September 14, 1921. Consequently, Anastasios Papoulas ordered a general retreat towards Eskişehir and Afyonkarahisar. The Greek troops evacuated the Mount Chal which had been taken at such cost and retired unmolested across the Sakarya River to the positions they have left a month before, taking with them their guns and equipment. In the line of the retreating army nothing was left that could benefit the Turks. Railways and bridges were blown up, the same way villages were burnt. After Greek retreat, Turkish forces managed to retake Sivrihisar on September 20, Aziziye on September 22, Bolvadin and Çay on September 24. The retreat from Sakarya marked the end of the Greek hopes of imposing settlement on Turkey by force of arms. In May 1922 General Papoulas and his complete staff resigned and was replaced by General Georgios Hatzianestis, who proved much more inept than his predecessor. On the other hand, Mustafa Kemal returned in triumph to Ankara where the Grand National Assembly awarded him the rank of Field Marshal of the Army, as well as the title of Gazi rendering honours as the saviour of the Turkish nation. According to the speech that was delivered years later before the same National Assembly at the Second General Conference of the Republican People's Party which took part from October 15 to October 20, 1927; Kemal said to have ordered that " ... "not an inch of the country should be abandoned until it was drenched with the blood of the citizens"...," upon realizing that the Turkish army was losing ground rapidly, with virtually no natural defenses left between the battle line and Ankara.