In Libya, however, Turkish machinations were not discontinued, although they were carried on with greater secrecy. The Turks still despatched officers, revolutionary proclamations, and Ottoman decorations to the insurgents, and the Germans sent rifles in double-bottomed beer-barrels _via_ Venice. Through an accident in transit on the railway one of these barrels was broken and the subterfuge and treachery became revealed. The rifles were new, and most of them bore the mark "St. Etienne," being meant not only to arm the revolt against Italy but also to create the belief that France was treacherously aiding and abetting the Tripolitan insurgents. And to crown all, during the efforts of fraternisation, in German fashion, Enver Bey's brother clandestinely joined the Senoussi, bringing 200,000 Turkish pounds and the Caliph's order "to purge the land of those Italian traitors." The never-to-be-forgotten "Scrap of Paper," the violation of neutral Belgium, the shooting and burning of civilians there, the slaying of the wounded, the torturing of the weak and helpless, at first chilled the warm blood of humane sentiment, then sent it boiling to the impressionable brain of the Latin race. Every new horror, every fresh crime in the scientific barbarians' destructive progress intensified the wrath and charged the emotional susceptibility of the Italian nation with explosive elements. The shrieks of the countless victims of demoniac fury awakened an echo in the hearts of plain men and women, who instinctively felt that what was happening to-day to the Belgians and the French might befall themselves to-morrow. The heinous treason against the human race which materialised in the destruction of the _Lusitania_ completed the gradual awakening of the Italian nation to a sense of those impalpable and imponderable elements of the European problem which find expression in no Green Book or Ambassadorial dispatch. It kindled a blaze of wrath and pity and heroic enthusiasm which consumed the cobwebs of official tradition and made short work of diplomatic fiction. Rome at the moment was absorbed by rumours and discussions about Germany's supreme efforts to coax Italy into an attitude of quiescence. But these machinations were suddenly forgotten in the fiery wrath and withering contempt which the foul misdeeds and culmination of crimes of the scientific assassins evoked, and in pity for the victims and their relatives.