After securing this diplomatic triumph Wangenheim was granted a vacation--he had certainly earned it--and Giers, the Russian Ambassador, went off on a vacation at the same time. Baroness Wangenheim explained to me--I was ignorant at this time of all these subtleties of diplomacy--precisely what these vacations signified. Wangenheim’s leave of absence, she said, meant that the German Foreign Office regarded the von Sanders episode as closed--and closed with a German victory. Giers’s furlough, she explained, meant that Russia declined to accept this point of view, end that, so far as Russia was concerned, the von Sanders affair had not ended. I remember writing to my family that, in this mysterious Balkan diplomacy, the nations talked to each other with acts, not words, and I instanced Baroness Wangenheim’s explanation of these diplomatic vacations as a case in point. An incident which took place in my own house opened all our eyes to the seriousness with which von Sanders regarded this military mission. On February 18th I gave my first diplomatic dinner; General von Sanders and his two daughters attended, the general sitting next to my daughter Ruth. My daughter, however, did not have a very enjoyable time; this German Field-Marshal, sitting there in his gorgeous uniform, his breast all sparkling with medals, did not say a word throughout the whole meal. He ate his food silently and sulkily, all my daughter’s attempts to enter into conversation evoking only an occasional surly monosyllable. The behaviour of this great military leader was that of a spoiled child. At the end of the dinner von Mutius, the German _chargé d’affaires_, came up to me in a high state of excitement. It was some time before he could sufficiently control his agitation to deliver his message. “You have made a terrible mistake, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “What is that?” I asked, naturally taken aback. “You have greatly offended Field-Marshal von Sanders. You have placed him at the dinner lower in rank than the foreign Ministers. He is the personal representative of the Kaiser, and as such is entitled to equal rank with the Ambassadors. He should have been placed ahead of the Cabinet Ministers and the Foreign Ministers.”