War between the Allies and Turkey became certain only three days before (October 31), but from the first the temptation of the Turkish Government to throw in their lot with “Central Europe” was powerful. It is true that, during three or four decades of last century, Turkey counted upon England for protection, and that by the Crimean War and the Treaty of Berlin England had protected her, with interested generosity, as a serviceable though frail barrier against Russian designs. But the British occupation of Egypt, the British intervention in Crete and Macedonia, and perhaps also the knowledge that a body of Englishmen fought for Greece in her disastrous campaign of 1897, shook Turkish confidence in the supposed protection; while, on the other hand, Abdul Hamid’s atrocious persecution of his subject races proved to the British middle classes that, though the Turk was described as “the gentleman of the Near East,” he still possessed qualities undesirable in an ally of professing Christians. Besides, within the last eight years (since 1906), the understanding between England and Russia had continually grown more definite, until it resulted in open alliance at the outbreak of the war; and Russia had long been Turkey’s relentless and insatiable foe. For she had her mind steadily set upon Constantinople, partly because, by a convenient and semi-religious myth, the Tsars regarded themselves as the natural heirs of the Byzantine Emperors, and partly in the knowledge that the possession of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles was essential for the development of Russia’s naval power. [Sidenote: HOW GERMANY WON TURKEY] Germany was not slow in taking up the part of Turkey’s friend as bit by bit it fell from England’s hand. If, in Lord Salisbury’s phrase, England found in the ’nineties that at the time of the Crimean War she had put her money on the wrong horse, Germany continued to back the weak-kneed and discarded outsider. Germany’s voice was never heard in the widespread outcry against “the Red Sultan.” German diplomacy regarded all Balkan races and Armenians with indifferent scorn. It called them “sheepstealers” (_Hammeldiebe_), and if Abdul Hamid chose to stamp upon troublesome subjects, that was his own affair. With that keen eye to his country’s material interest which, before the war, made him the most enterprising and successful of commercial travellers, Kaiser Wilhelm II., repeating the earlier visit of 1889, visited the Sultan in state at the height of his unpopularity (1898), commemorated the favour by the gift of a deplorable fountain to the city, and proceeded upon a speculative pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which holy city German or Turkish antiquarians patched with the lath and plaster restorations befitting so curious an occasion.