This wireless plant was an outward symbol of the close though unacknowledged association which then existed between Turkey and Berlin. It took some time to finish such an extensive station, and in the interim Wangenheim was using the apparatus on the Corcovado, a German merchant-ship which was lying in the Bosphorus opposite the German Embassy. For practical purposes, Wangenheim had a constant telephone connection with Berlin.

German officers were almost as active as the Turks themselves in this mobilisation. They enjoyed it all immensely; indeed, they gave every sign that they were having the time of their lives. Bronsart, Humann, and Lafferts were constantly at Enver’s elbow, advising and directing the operations. German officers were rushing through the streets every day in huge automobiles, all requisitioned from the civilian population; they filled all the restaurants and amusement places at night and celebrated their joy in the situation by consuming large quantities of champagne—also requisitioned. A particularly spectacular and noisy figure was that of von der Goltz Pasha. He was constantly making a kind of viceregal progress through the streets in a huge and madly-dashing automobile, on both sides of which flaring German eagles were painted. A trumpeter on the front seat would blow loud, defiant blasts as the conveyance rushed along, and woe to anyone, Turk or non-Turk, who happened to get in the way! The Germans made no attempt to conceal their conviction that they owned this town. Just as Wangenheim had established a little Wilhelmstrasse in his Embassy, so had the German military men established a sub-station of the Berlin General Staff. They even brought their wives and families from Germany; I heard Baroness Wangenheim remark that she was holding a little court of her own.

The Germans, however, were about the only people who were enjoying this proceeding. The requisitioning that accompanied the mobilisation really amounted to a wholesale looting of the civilian population. The Turks took all the horses, mules, camels, sheep, cows, and other beasts that they could lay their hands on, Enver telling me that they had gathered in 150,000 animals. They did it most intelligently, making no provision for the continuance of the species; thus they would leave only two cows or two mares in many of the villages. This system of requisitioning, as I shall describe, had the inevitable result of destroying the nation’s agriculture, and ultimately led to the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people. But the Turks, like the Germans, thought that the war was destined to be a very short one, and that they would quickly recuperate from the injuries which their methods of supplying an army were causing their peasant population. The Government showed precisely the same shamelessness and lack of intelligence in the way that they requisitioned materials from merchants and shopmen. These proceedings amounted to little less than conscious highwaymanship. But practically none of these merchants were Moslems; most of them were Christians, though there were a few Jews, and the Turkish officials therefore not only provided the needs of their army, and incidentally lined their own pockets, but they found a religious joy in pillaging the infidel establishments. They would enter a retail shop, take practically all the merchandise on the shelves, and give merely a piece of paper in acknowledgment. As the Government had never paid for the supplies which it had taken in the Italian and Balkan Wars, the merchants hardly expected that they would ever receive anything for these latest requisitions. Afterward, many who understood officialdom, and were politically influential, did recover to the extent of 70 per cent.—what became of the remaining 30 per cent. is not a secret to those who have had experience with Turkish bureaucrats.

Thus, for most of the population, requisitioning simply meant financial ruin. That the process was merely pillaging is shown by many of the materials which the army took, ostensibly for the use of the soldiers. Thus the officers seized all the mohair they could find; on occasion they even carried off women’s silk stockings, corsets, and babies’ slippers, and I heard one case in which they reinforced the Turkish commissary with caviar and other delicacies. They demanded blankets from one merchant who was a dealer in women’s underwear; because he had no such stock, they seized what he had, and he afterward saw his appropriated goods reposing in rival establishments. The Turks did the same thing in many other cases. The prevailing system was to take movable property wherever available and convert it into cash; where the money ultimately went I do not know, but that many private fortunes were made I have little doubt. I told Enver that this ruthless method of mobilising and requisitioning was destroying his country. Misery and starvation soon began to afflict the land. Out of 4,000,000 adult male population more than 1,500,000 were ultimately enlisted, and so about a million families were left without breadwinners, all of them in a condition of extreme destitution. The Turkish Government paid its soldiers 25 cents a month, and gave the families a separation allowance of $1.20 a month. As a result, thousands were dying from lack of food and many more were enfeebled by malnutrition. I believe that the Empire has lost a quarter of its Turkish population since the war started. I asked Enver why he permitted his people to be destroyed in this way. But sufferings like these did not distress him. He was much impressed by his success in raising a large army with practically no money—something, he boasted, which no other nation had ever done before. In order to accomplish this, Enver had issued orders which stigmatised the evasion of military service as desertion, and therefore punishable with the death penalty. He also adopted a scheme by which any Ottoman could obtain exemption by the payment of about $190. Still, Enver regarded his accomplishment as a notable one. It was really his first taste of unlimited power, and he enjoyed the experience greatly.

That the Germans directed this mobilisation is not a matter of opinion but of proof. I need only instance that the Germans were requisitioning materials in their own name for their own use. I have a photographic copy of such a requisition made by Humann, the German naval attaché, for a shipload of oil-cake. This document is dated September 29, 1914. “The lot by the steamship Derindje which you mentioned in your letter of the 26th,” this paper reads, “has been requisitioned by me for the German Government.” This clearly shows that, a month before Turkey had entered the war, Germany was really exercising the powers of sovereignty at Constantinople.

CHAPTER V
WANGENHEIM SMUGGLES THE “GOEBEN” AND THE “BRESLAU” THROUGH THE DARDANELLES

On August 10th I went out on a little launch to meet the Sicilia, a small Italian ship which had just arrived from Venice. I was especially interested in this vessel because she was bringing to Constantinople my daughter and son-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Wertheim, and their three little daughters. The greeting proved even more interesting than I had expected. I found the passengers considerably excited, for they had witnessed, the day before, a naval engagement in the Ionian Sea.

“We were lunching yesterday on deck,” my daughter told me, “when I saw two strange-looking vessels just above the horizon. I ran for the glasses and made out two large battleships, the first one with two queer exotic-looking towers, and the other one quite an ordinary-looking battleship. We watched and saw another ship coming up behind them and going very fast. She came nearer and nearer, and then we heard guns booming. Pillars of water sprang up in the air and there were many little puffs of white smoke. It took me some time to realise what it was all about, and then it burst upon me that we were actually witnessing an engagement. The ships continually shifted their position, but went on and on. The two big ones turned and rushed furiously for the little one, and then apparently they changed their minds and turned back. Then the little one turned around and calmly steamed in our direction. At first I was somewhat alarmed at this, but nothing happened. She circled around us with her tars excited and grinning, and somewhat grimy. They signalled to our captain many questions, and then turned and finally disappeared. The captain told us that the two big ships were Germans which had been caught in the Mediterranean and which were trying to escape from the British fleet. He says that the British ships are chasing them all over the Mediterranean, and that the German ships are trying to get into Constantinople. Have you seen anything of them? Where do you suppose the British fleet is?”

A few hours afterward I happened to meet Wangenheim. When I told him what Mrs. Wertheim had seen, he displayed an agitated interest. Immediately after lunch he called at the American Embassy with Pallavicini, the Austrian Ambassador, and asked for an interview with my daughter. The two Ambassadors solemnly planted themselves in chairs before Mrs. Wertheim and subjected her to a most minute, though very polite, cross-examination. “I never felt so important in my life,” she afterwards told me. They would not permit her to leave out a single detail; they wished to know how many shots had been fired, what direction the German ships had taken, what everybody on board had said, and so on. The visit seemed to give these allied Ambassadors immense relief and satisfaction, for they left the house in an almost jubilant mood, behaving as though a great weight had been taken off their minds. And certainly they had good reason for their elation. My daughter had been the means of giving them the news which they had desired to hear above everything else—that the Goeben and the Breslau had escaped the British fleet and were then steaming rapidly in the direction of the Dardanelles.

For it was those famous German ships, the Goeben and the Breslau, which my daughter had seen engaged in battle with a British scout ship!