Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
I called upon him in the evening at ten o’clock and stayed with him
until eleven. I spent the larger part of this hour in a fruitless
attempt to interest him in the plight of these non-combatants.
Wangenheim said point-blank that he would not assist me. “It is
perfectly proper,” he maintained, “for the Turks to establish a
concentration camp at Gallipoli. It is also proper for them to put
non-combatant English and French on their transports and thus insure
them against attack.” As I made repeated attempts to argue the matter,
Wangenheim would deftly shift the conversation to other topics.
According to my record of this talk, written out at the time, the German
Ambassador discussed almost every subject except the one upon which I
had called.
“This act of the Turks will greatly injure Germany----” I would begin.
“Do you know that the English soldiers at Gaba Tepe are without food and
drink?” he would reply. “They made an attack to capture a well and were
repulsed. The English have taken their ships away so as to prevent their
soldiers from retreating----”
“But about this Gallipoli business,” I interrupted. “Germans themselves
here in Constantinople have said that Germany should stop it----”
“The Allies landed 45,000 men on the Peninsula,” Wangenheim answered,
“and of these 10,000 were killed. In a few days we shall attack the rest
and destroy them.”
When I attempted to approach the subject from another angle, this master
diplomatist would begin discussing Rumania and the possibility of
obtaining ammunition by way of that country.
“Your secretary, Bryan,” he said, “has just issued a statement showing
that it would be unneutral for the United States to refuse to sell
ammunition to the Allies, so we have used this same argument with the
Rumanians; if it is unneutral not to sell ammunition, it is certainly
unneutral to refuse to transport it!”
The humorous aspects of this argument appealed to Wangenheim, but I
reminded him that I was there to discuss the lives of between 2,000 and
3,000 non-combatants. As I touched upon this subject again, Wangenheim
replied that the United States would not be acceptable to Germany as a
peacemaker now, because we were so friendly to the Entente. He insisted
on giving me all the details of recent German successes in the
Carpathians and the latest news on the Italian situation.
“We would rather fight Italy than have her for our ally,” he said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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