Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
making one last despairing attempt to gird itself for action.
These wretched marchers little realized what was the power that was
dragging them from the four corners of their country. Even we of the
diplomatic group had not then clearly grasped the real situation. We
learned afterward that the signal for this mobilization had not come
originally from Enver or Talaat or the Turkish Cabinet, but from the
General Staff in Berlin and its representatives in Constantinople. Liman
von Sanders and Bronssart were really directing the complicated
operation. There were unmistakable signs of German activity. As soon as
the German armies crossed the Rhine, work was begun on a mammoth
wireless station a few miles outside of Constantinople. The materials
all came from Germany by way of Rumania, and the skilled mechanics,
industriously working from daybreak to sunset, were unmistakably
Germans. Of course, the neutrality laws would have prohibited the
construction of a wireless station for a belligerent in a neutral
country like Turkey; it was therefore officially announced that a German
company was building this heaven-pointing structure for the Turkish
Government and on the Sultan’s own property. But this story deceived no
one. Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, spoke of it freely and
constantly as a German enterprise.
“Have you seen our wireless yet?” he would ask me. “Come on, let’s ride
up there and look it over.”
He proudly told me that it was the most powerful in the world--powerful
enough to catch all messages sent from the Eiffel Tower in Paris! He
said that it would put him in constant communication with Berlin. So
little did he attempt to conceal its German ownership that several
times, when ordinary telegraphic communication was suspended, he offered
to let me use it to send my telegrams.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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