The Council of Ministers was sitting at the time, but Enver came out. His mood was more demonstrative than usual. As he described the attack, of the British fleet he became extremely angry; it was not the imperturbable Enver with whom I had become so familiar. “These cowardly English!” he exclaimed. “They tried for a long time to get through the Dardanelles, and we were too much for them! And see what kind of a revenge they are taking. Their ships sneak up into the outer bay, where our guns cannot reach them, and shoot over the hills at our little villages, killing harmless old men, women, and children, and bombarding our hospitals. Do you think we are going to let them do that? And what can we do? Our guns don’t reach over the hills, so that we cannot meet them in battle. If we could, we would drive them off, just as we did at the straits a month ago. We have no fleet to send to England to bombard their unfortified towns as they are bombarding ours, so we have decided to move all the English and French we can find to Gallipoli. Let them kill their own people as well as ours.” I told him that, granted that the circumstances were as he had stated them, he had grounds for indignation. But I called his attention to the fact that he was wrong; that he was accusing the Allies of crimes which they were not committing. “This is about the most barbarous thing that you have ever contemplated,” I said. “The British have a perfect right to attack a military headquarters like Gallipoli.” But my argument did not move Enver. I became convinced that he had not decided on this step as a reprisal to protect his own countrymen, but that he and his associates were really looking for revenge. The fact that the Australians and New Zealanders had successfully effected a landing had aroused their most barbarous instincts. Enver referred to this landing in our talk. Though he professed to regard it lightly, and said that he would soon push the French and English into the sea, I saw that it was causing him much concern. The Turk, as I have said before, is psychologically primitive; to answer the British landing at Gallipoli by murdering hundreds of helpless British who were in his power would strike him as perfectly logical. As a result of this talk I gained only a few concessions. Enver agreed to postpone the deportation until Thursday--it was then Sunday--to exclude women and children from the order, and to take none of the British and French who were then connected with American institutions. “All the rest will have to go,” was his final word. “Moreover,” he added, “we don’t purpose to have the English ships fire at the transports we are sending to the Dardanelles. In the future we shall put a few Englishmen and Frenchmen on every ship we send down there as a protection to our own soldiers.”