These wretched marchers little realised what was the power that was dragging them from the four corners of their country. Even we of the diplomatic group had not then clearly grasped the real situation. We learned afterwards that the signal for this mobilisation had not come originally from Enver or Talaat or the Turkish Cabinet, but the General Staff in Berlin and its representatives in Constantinople, Liman von Sanders and Bronsart, were really directing the variegated operation. There were unmistakable signs of German activity. As soon as the German armies crossed the Rhine work was begun on a mammoth wireless station a few miles outside of Constantinople. The materials all came from Germany by way of Rumania, and the mechanics, industriously working from daybreak to sunset, were unmistakably Germans. Of course, the neutrality laws would have prohibited the construction of a wireless station for a belligerent in a neutral country like Turkey; it was therefore officially announced that a German company was building this heaven-pointing structure for the Turkish Government and on the Sultan’s own property. But this story deceived no one. Wangenheim, the German Ambassador, spoke of it freely and constantly as a German enterprise. “Have you seen our wireless yet?” he would ask me. “Come on, let’s ride up there and look it over.” He proudly told me that it was the most powerful in the world--powerful enough to catch all messages sent by the Eiffel Tower in Paris! He said that it would put him in constant communication with Berlin. So little did he attempt to conceal its German ownership that several times, when ordinary telegraphic communication was suspended, he offered to let me use it to send my telegrams. This wireless plant was an outward symbol of the close though unacknowledged association which then existed between Turkey and Berlin. It took some time to finish such an extensive station, and in the interim Wangenheim was using the apparatus on the _Corcovado_, a German merchant-ship which was lying in the Bosphorus opposite the German Embassy. For practical purposes, Wangenheim had a constant telephone connection with Berlin.