To all my appeals, at the Embassy and elsewhere, for British friendship and help to put Turkey on her feet again, I met the same foolish, “parrot” reply: “We cannot sacrifice Russia!” Nevertheless, when I returned to London, and published “An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem” (the diary record of private friendships, widely circulated in the East), we, the friends of Turkey, determined to defy the Government, and formed an Ottoman Society for that purpose. When the war broke out I had just reached Berlin, once more _en route_ for Turkey, Asia Minor, and afterwards Persia and India. It is obvious that the world-tragedy had even a sharper sting for those of us who were bidden to hate our life-long “best friends” among the enemy peoples. Often enough, moreover, the individual “foe” (as was the case with my Turkish “sister”) could not throw off the heart’s allegiance to England merely because “it was war.” Can we, indeed, honestly blame the young Turks? In the first place, they did not choose their own path. One man, Enver Pasha, joined Germany _against_ the wishes of a whole nation. As _one_ man, Mr. Lloyd George, would once have drawn the most constitutional of all peoples to fight the Turks, had not General Harington, luckily for them and us, disobeyed his command! Besides, we did _nothing_ to preserve our friendship with Turkey. Years of indifference, and most impolitic scoffings at real reforming enthusiasm, were followed, at the eleventh hour, by total neglect of any conciliating diplomacy, which could even then have kept Turkey out of the war, and shortened it by two years. For instance, on the outbreak of war with Germany, “without notice, without the most banal of the forms of courtesy, on the very day when the Turkish flag should have been hoisted over the ships handed over to the Ottoman Commission, which had come to England to take charge of them, the dreadnoughts were seized by Great Britain and no offer was made by the British Government to refund, at least, the price of the two ships....” So wrote the late Grand Vizier Hakki Pasha; and one could mention many other, similar, senseless pin-pricks, which may inflame such people almost more than insults of greater import. During the war my friendship for Turkey proved a serious handicap in hospital work. Anyone jealous of what privileges were by chance accorded to me would hand over a few choice tit-bits—that grew in passing—to the secret police. The French, unless in a fit of really inevitable war-depression, paid scant heed to such reports. The Americans, however, easily took alarm. One, I remember, actually spoke to me about the matter with a terror only equalled, in my experience, by that of the Cabinet Minister’s brother who once asked me: “How I could do anything so foolish as to live in a harem?” It was a poor compliment to one of Turkey’s greatest statesmen, and to my hostess, his distinguished daughter.