The full significance of her intervention on behalf of the Jews, when neither the extermination of the Armenians, the persecution of the Arabs, nor the deportation of the Greeks moved Germany to any decided action or energetic protest, must be left, in so far as it concerns the future, to another chapter. But as regards the present and the past it will be useful to consider here what has prompted her to make a protest (which we may regard, so long as her foot is on the neck of the Turks, as having been successful) against these projected massacres. Certainly it was not humanity; it was not the faintest desire to save innocent people in general from being murdered wholesale, for in the similar case of the Armenians, her bowels of compassion were not moved. Or, possibly, if we incline to lenience, we may say that she was sorry for the Armenians, but could not then risk a disagreement with their murderers who were her allies, whereas now, feeling herself more completely dominant over the Turks than she then did, she could risk being peremptory, especially since there was that saving clause about military requirements. For during the Armenian massacres, the Dardanelles expedition was still on the shores of Gallipoli, and the menace to Constantinople acute. It was possible that if she opposed a firm front to the Armenian massacres, the Turks, already on the verge of despair with regard to saving the capital from capture, might have made terms with the Allies. But now no such imminence of danger threatened them, and, with Germany's domination over them vastly more secure than it had been in 1915, she could afford to treat them less as allies and more as a conquered people. This alone might have accounted for her unprecedented impulse of humanity in the minds of those who still attribute such instincts to her, but she had far stronger reasons than that for wanting to save the Jews of Palestine.

Her policy with regard to them is set forth in a pamphlet by Dr. Davis Treitsch, called Die Jüden der Türkei, published in 1915, which is a most illuminating little document. These Jewish colonies, as we have seen, came from Russia, and as Germany realised, long before the war, they might easily form a German nucleus in the Near East, for they largely consisted of German-speaking Jews, akin in language and blood to a most important element in her own population. 'In a certain sense,' says Dr. Treitsch, 'the Jews are a Near Eastern element in Germany and a German element in Turkey.' He goes on with unerring acumen to lament the exodus of German-speaking Jews to the United States and to England. 'Annually some 100,000 of these are lost to Germany, the empire of the English language and the economic system that goes with it is being enlarged, while a German asset is being proportionately depreciated.... It will no longer do simply to close the German frontiers to them, and in view of the difficulties which would result from a wholesale migration of Jews into Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad to find a way out in the emigration of those Jews to Turkey--a solution extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all three parties concerned.'

Here, then, is the matter in a nutshell: Germany, wide-awake as ever, saw long ago the advantage to her of a growing Jewish population from the Pale in Turkey. She was perhaps a little overloaded with them herself, but in this immigration from Russia to Palestine she saw the formation of a colony that was well worth German protection, and the result of the war, provided the Palestinian immigrants were left in peace, would be to augment very largely the number of those settling there. 'Galicia,' says Dr. Treitsch, 'and the western provinces of Russia, which between them contain more than half the Jews in the world, have suffered more from the war than any other region. Jewish homes have been broken up by hundreds of thousands, and there is no doubt whatever that, as a result of the war, there will be an emigration of East European Jews on an unprecedented scale.' This emigration, then, to Palestine was, in Germany's view, a counter-weight to the 100,000 annually lost to her through emigration to America and England. With her foot on Turkey's neck she had control over these German-speaking Jews, and saw in them the elements of a German colony. Her calculations, it is true, were somewhat upset by the development of the Zionist movement, by which those settlers declared themselves to have a nationality of their own, and a language of their own, and Dr. Treitsch concedes that. 'But,' he adds, 'in addition to Hebrew, to which they are more and more inclined, the Jews must have a world-language, and this can only be German.'

This, then, in brief, and only up to the present, is the story of how the Jewish massacres were stayed. The Jews were potential Germans, and Germany, who sat by with folded hands when Arabs and Armenians were led to torture and death, put up a warning finger, and, for the present, saved them. In her whole conduct of the war, nothing has been more characteristic than her 'verboten' to one projected massacre and her acquiescence in others. But, as for her having saved the Jews out of motives of humanity, 'Credant Judaei!'

Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter V

DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLAH

It was commonly said at the beginning of this war that, whatever Germany's military resources might be, she was hopelessly and childishly lacking in diplomatic ability and in knowledge of psychology, from which all success in diplomacy is distilled. As instances of this grave defect, people adduced the fact that, apparently, she had not anticipated the entry of Great Britain into the war at all, while her treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards was universally pronounced to be not a crime merely, but a blunder of the stupidest sort. It is perfectly true that Germany did not understand, and, as seems likely in the light of innumerable other atrocities, never will understand, the psychology of civilised peoples; she has never shown any signs up till now, at any rate, of 'having got the hang of it' at all. But critics of her diplomacy failed to see the root-fact that she did not understand it merely because it did not interest her. It was not worth her while to master the psychology of other civilised nations, since she was out not to understand them, but to conquer them. She had all the information she wanted about their armies and navies and guns and ammunition neatly and correctly tabulated. Why, then, since this was all that concerned her, should she cram her head with irrelevant information about what they might feel on the subject of gas-attacks or the torpedoing of neutral ships without warning? As long as her fumes were deadly and her submarines subtle, nothing further concerned her.

But Europe generally made a great mistake in supposing that Germany could not learn psychology, and the process of its distillation into diplomacy when it interested her. The psychology of the French and English was a useless study, for she was merely going to fight them, but for years she had been studying with an industry and a patience that put our diplomacy to shame (as was most swiftly and ignominiously proven when it came into conflict with hers) the psychology of the Turks. For years she had watched the dealings of the Great Powers with Turkey, but she had never really associated herself with that policy. She sat quietly by and saw how it worked. Briefly it was this. For a hundred years Turkey had been kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions of the Physician Powers, who dared not let him die for fear of the stupendous quarrels which would instantly arise over his corpse. So there they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive with injections of strychnine and oxygen, and, no less, by a policy of rousing and irritating the patient. All through the reign of Abdul Hamid they persevered: Great Britain plucked his pillow from him, so to speak, by her protectorate of Egypt; Russia tweaked Eastern Rumelia from him; France deprived him of his hot-water bottle when she snatched at the Constantinople quays, and they all shook and slapped him when he went to war with Greece in 1896, and instantly deprived him of the territory he had won in Thessaly. That was the principle of European diplomacy towards Turkey, and from it Germany always held aloof.