But, most disastrously for our cause, the tact and financial persuasion were all on the other side. The Allies, it is true, gave the Porte “definite assurances that, if Turkey remained neutral, her independence and integrity would be respected during the war and in the terms of peace.”[3] But similar and stronger assurances had been given both at the Treaty of Berlin and at the outbreak of the first Balkan War in 1912. Unfortunately for our peace, Turkey had discovered that at the Powers’ perjuries Time laughs, nor had Time long to wait for laughter. Following upon successive jiltings, protestations of future affection are cautiously regarded unless backed by solid evidences of good faith; but the Allies, having previously refused loans which Berlin hastened to advance, had further revealed the frivolity of their intentions the very day before war with Germany was declared, by seizing the two Dreadnought battleships, _Sultan Osman_ and _Reshadie_, then building for the Turkish service in British dockyards. Upon these two battleships the Turks had set high, perhaps exaggerated, hopes, and Turkish peasants had contributed to their purchase; for they regarded them as insurance against further Greek aggression among the islands of the Asiatic coast. Coming on the top of the Egyptian occupation, the philanthropic interference with sovereign atrocity, the Russian alliance, and the refusal of loans, their seizure overthrew the shaken credit of England’s honesty, and one might almost say that for a couple of Dreadnoughts we lost Constantinople and the Straits.[4] [Sidenote: GERMANY TAKES HER ADVANTAGE] With lightning rapidity, Germany seized the advantage of our blunder. At the declaration of war, the _Goeben_, one of her finest battle-cruisers, a ship of 22,625 tons, capable of 28 knots, and armed with ten 11-inch guns, twelve 5·9-inch, and twelve lesser guns, was stationed off Algeria, accompanied by the fast light cruiser _Breslau_ (4478 tons, twelve 4·1 inch guns), which had formed part of the international force at Durazzo during the farcical rule of Prince von Wied in Albania. After bombarding two Algerian towns, they coaled at Messina, and, escaping thence with melodramatic success, eluded the Allied Mediterranean command, and reached Constantinople through the Dardanelles, though suffering slight damage from the light cruiser _Gloucester_ (August 8 or 9). When Sir Louis Mallet and the other Allied Ambassadors demanded their dismantlement, the Kaiser, with constrained but calculated charity, nominally sold or presented them to Turkey as a gift, crews, guns, and all. Here, then, were two fine ships, not merely building, but solidly afloat and ready to hand. The gift was worth an overwhelming victory to the foreseeing donor.[5]