Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
“If your father is not here at 6.15,” I told Miss Pears, “please let me
know immediately.”
Promptly at that time my telephone rang. It was Miss Pears, who informed
me that Sir Edwin had just reached home.
The next day Sir Edwin called at the Embassy to thank me for my efforts
on his behalf. He told me that the German Ambassador had also worked for
his release. This latter statement naturally surprised me; I knew no one
else had had a chance to do anything, as everything transpired while I
was in Talaat’s office. Half an hour afterward I met Wangenheim himself;
he dropped in at Mrs. Morgenthau’s reception. I referred to the Pears
case and asked him whether he had used any influence in securing his
release. My question astonished him greatly.
“What?” he said. “I helped you to secure his release! _Der alte gauner!_
(The old rascal.) Why, I was the man who had him arrested!”
“What have you got against him?” I asked.
“In 1876,” Wangenheim replied, “that man was pro-Russian and against
Turkey!”
Such are the long memories of the Germans! In 1876 Sir Edwin wrote
several articles for the London _Daily News_ describing the Bulgarian
massacres. At that time the reports of these fiendish atrocities were
generally disbelieved, and Sir Edwin’s letters placed all the
incontrovertible facts before the English-speaking peoples and had much
to do with the emancipation of Bulgaria from Turkish rule. This act of
humanity and journalistic statesmanship had brought Sir Edwin much fame,
and now, after forty years, Germany proposed to punish him by casting
him into a Turkish prison! Again the Turks proved more considerate than
their German allies, for they not only gave Sir Edwin his liberty and
his papers, but permitted him to return to London.
Bedri, however, was a little mortified at my successful intervention in
this instance, and decided to even up the score. Next to Sir Edwin
Pears, the most prominent English-speaking barrister in Constantinople
was Dr. Mizzi, a Maltese, seventy years old. The ruling powers had a
grudge against him, for he was the proprietor of the _Levant Herald_, a
paper which had published articles criticising the Union and Progress
Committee. On the very night of the Pears episode Bedri went to Dr.
Mizzi’s house at eleven o’clock, routed the old gentleman out of bed,
arrested him, and placed him on a train for Angora, in Asia Minor. As a
terrible epidemic of typhus was raging in Angora, this was not a
desirable place of residence for a man of Dr. Mizzi’s years. The next
morning, when I heard of it for the first time, Dr. Mizzi was well on
the way to his place of exile.
“This time I got ahead of you!” said Bedri, with a triumphant laugh. He
was as good-natured about it and as pleased as a boy. At last he had
“put one over” on the American Ambassador, who had been unguardedly
asleep in his bed when this old man had been railroaded to a fever camp
in Asia Minor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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