A cunning manœuvre for saving the future of Pangermanism and of Enver Pasha’s gang in Turkey has already been broached by the Germans. As it will certainly be attempted again, should it be in the interest of Berlin to push it through (and everything points that way), it becomes necessary to unmask it completely beforehand. In February, 1916, numerous Turkish agents, installed in Switzerland and apparently working through spies in the Allied countries, began to set afloat a rumour that Turkey was ready to conclude a separate peace. Enver Pasha had been assassinated (which of course was a lie), and so forth. The aim of this manœuvre was to secure in the Allied countries the assistance of those incorrigible fools, armed with the panoply of crass ignorance on the affairs of the East, who nevertheless are not always without influence on men at the head of affairs. If I am rightly informed, this clever dodge of the Turkish agents did really succeed for a time in enlisting some of the fools I speak of. In the opinion of these gentry the conclusion of a separate peace with Turkey would have been a very good move, since it would have deprived Germany of the help of her Ottoman ally, etc. These are very dangerous illusions, and it is necessary to show how and why this measure would play the game of Berlin and gravely imperil the victory of the Allies. The Turks, greatly alarmed by the Russian successes in Armenia, see at the same time their dream of a Panislamic movement fading away. They are obliged to acknowledge to themselves that the Germans are cynically using them for their own selfish ends, are driving them along the road to famine by making a clean sweep of all their food supplies, and are sending them to slaughter for the higher interests of Pangermany. But while the mass of the Turks may very well feel their anger beginning to rise against the Germans, they are completely in the hands of the Young-Turk ringleaders, who in their turn are bound over, hand and foot, to the Germans; and more and more the Germans are masters of the organs of administration and government in Turkey. Therefore there is no counting on an effective revolt of the Turkish population, who moreover are entirely destitute of the spirit of organization. On the other hand, the Germans are far-seeing people and perfectly understand that Turkey is hastening towards a catastrophe. _But to bring about a separate peace between Turkey and the Allies would be equivalent to inducing the Allies to recognize the permanence of the Ottoman empire; it would thus save that empire from disaster, and leave the door open for Berlin to re-open its old intrigues after the conclusion of a peace on the basis of the “drawn game”_ (see chap. V).