It is needless to multiply instances of German penetration:  I have but given the skeleton of this German monster that has fastened itself with tentacles and suckers on every branch of Turkish industry.  There is none round which it has not cast its feelers—­no Semitic moneylender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim.  In matters naval, military, educational, legal, industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle-hold.  Turkey’s life is already crushed out of her, and, as we have seen, it has been crushed out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, who, among all the Great Powers of Europe, invested their time and their money in the achievement of the Pan-Turkish ideal.  Silently and skilfully they worked, bamboozling their chief tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha bamboozled us.  As long as he was of service to them they retained him; for his peace of mind at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in Constantinople because so many threatening letters were sent him.  But now Enver Pasha seems to have had his day; he became a little autocratic, and thought that he was the head of the Pan-Turkish ideal.  So he was, but the Pan-Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and he had not noticed the transformation.  Talaat Bey has taken his place; it was he who, in May 1917, was received by the Emperor William, by King Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, and he who was the mouthpiece of the German efforts to make a separate peace with Russia.  Under Czardom, he proclaimed, the existence of Turkey was threatened, but now the revolution has made friendship possible, for Russia no longer desires territorial annexation.  And, oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia’s friend!  Enver Pasha has of late been somewhat out of favour in Berlin, and I cannot but think it curious that when, on April 2, 1917, he visited the submarine base at Wilhelmshaven, he was very nearly killed in a motor accident.  But it may have been an accident.  Since then I cannot find that he has taken any more active part in Pan-Turkish ideals than to open a soup-kitchen in some provincial town, and lecture the Central Committee of the Young Turks on the subject of internal affairs in Great Britain.  I do not like lectures, but I should have liked to hear that one.

I have left to the end of this chapter the question of Germany’s knowledge of, and complicity in the Armenian massacres.  From the tribune of the Reichstag, on January 15, 1916, there was made a definite denial of the existence of such massacres at all; on another subsequent occasion it was stated that Germany could not interfere in Turkish internal affairs.

In view of the fact that there is no internal affair appertaining to Turkey in which Germany has not interfered, the second of these statements may be called insincere.  But the denial of the massacres is a deliberate lie.  Germany—­official Germany—­knew all about them, and she permitted them to go on.  A few proofs of this are here shortly stated.