All this time I was bringing pressure upon Enver also. The Minister of War, as I have already indicated, was a different type of man from Talaat. He concealed his real feelings much more successfully; he was usually suave, cold-blooded, and scrupulously polite. And at first he was by no means so callous as Talaat in discussing the Armenians. He dismissed the early stories as wild exaggerations, declared that the troubles at Van were merely ordinary warfare, and attempted to quiet my fears that the wholesale annihilation of the Armenians had been decided on. Yet all the time that Enver was attempting to deceive me he was making open admissions to other people--a fact of which I was aware. In particular, he made no attempt to conceal the real situation from Dr. Lepsius, a representative of German missionary interests. Dr. Lepsius was a high-minded Christian gentleman. He had been all through the Armenian massacres of 1895, and he had raised considerable sums of money to build orphanages for Armenian children who had lost their parents at that time. He came again in 1915 to investigate the Armenian situation on behalf of German missionary interests. He asked for the privilege of inspecting the reports of American Consuls, and I granted it. These documents, supplemented by other information which Dr. Lepsius derived largely from German missionaries in the interior, left no doubt in his mind as to the policy of the Turks. His feelings were aroused chiefly against his own Government. He expressed to me the humiliation which he felt, as a German, that the Turks should deliberately set about to exterminate their Christian subjects while Germany, ostensibly a Christian country, was making no endeavours to prevent it. To him Enver scarcely concealed the official purpose. Dr. Lepsius was simply staggered by his frankness, for Enver told him in so many words that they at last had an opportunity to rid themselves of the Armenians and that they proposed to use it. By this time Enver had become more frank with me--the circumstantial reports which I possessed made it useless for him to attempt to conceal the true situation further--and we had many long and animated discussions on the subject. One of these I recall with particular vividness. I notified Enver that I intended to take up the matter in detail, and he laid aside enough time to go over the whole situation.