The disasters of the Turks before the armistice had an extraordinary moral effect in Germany. The new principle laid down by the friends of the victors, “The Balkans for the Balkan nations,” seemed to be accepted without much cavil by the Imperial Government and the Press. A scornful indifference towards Turkey and her misfortunes suddenly took the place of their former cordial friendliness. The Emperor, always ready to turn aside from the weak and to make advances to the strong, was one of the first to perform this interesting change of front. The Wilhelmstrasse exerted itself above all to soothe the anger of the Ballplatz and to stifle its faint cries for intervention, preaching the doctrine that Turkey should be left to her fate. I learned on good authority that when William II. took leave of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who, under colour of taking part in an Imperial shooting party, had come to Berlin to discuss the situation with him, he exclaimed, just as the train was starting: “Now remember—no silly adventures!” The confining of the Ottoman Empire to its Asiatic possessions, with Constantinople as a bridgehead in Europe, was a solution regarded at Berlin during the whole winter, after and even before the capture of Adrianople, as eminently acceptable. The abandonment of her European provinces, which had become a serious burden on the Ottoman Treasury, would leave Turkey free to devote all her resources to exploiting her neglected domains in Anatolia and Syria, where her real wealth lay. The Crescent would shine with more dazzling radiance in the sky of Asia. The Berlin Press threw out hints of this kind to its Constantinople friends by way of consolation. Since German finance and industry had locked up vast sums of capital in the Asiatic vilayets for the building of railways and the irrigation of the adjoining land concessions, the most urgent business of the Imperial Government seemed to consist henceforth in ensuring the success of these undertakings. The directors of the Deutsche Bank, concessionaires for the Bagdad Railway, made every effort to discover means of saving the flotsam and jetsam of the Turkish wreck, and of settling the financial problems on which it was already decided a conference was to sit in Paris. IV.