Dardanelles thus meant to Pallavicini the extinction of his country, for if we are properly to understand his state of mind we must remember that he firmly believed, as did almost all the other important men in Constantinople, that such an attack would succeed. Wangenheim’s existence was made miserable by this same haunting conviction. As I have already shown, the bottling-up of Russia was almost exclusively the German Ambassador’s performance. He had brought the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_ into Constantinople, and by this manœuvre had precipitated Turkey into the war. The forcing of the strait would mean more than the transformation of Russia into a permanent and powerful participant in the war; it meant--and this was by no means an unimportant consideration with Wangenheim--the undoing of his great personal achievement. Yet Wangenheim showed his apprehensions quite differently from Pallavicini. In true German fashion, he resorted to threats and bravado. He gave no external signs of depression, but his whole body tingled with rage. He was not deploring his fate; he was looking for ways of striking back. He would sit in my office, smoking with his usual energy, and tell me all the terrible things which he proposed to do to his enemy. The thing that particularly preyed upon Wangenheim’s mind was the exposed position of the German Embassy. It stood on a high hill, one of the most conspicuous buildings in the town, a perfect target for an enterprising English admiral. Almost the first object the British fleet would sight, as it entered the Bosphorus, would be this yellow monument of the Hohenzollerns, and the temptation to shell it might prove irresistible. “Let them dare destroy that Embassy!” Wangenheim said. “I’ll get even with them! If they fire a single shot at it we’ll blow up the French and the English Embassies! Go tell the Admiral that, won’t you? Tell him also that we have the dynamite ready to do it!”