By handling, as I did, hundreds of those secret reports which reached the Emperor I had learned much concerning Herr Anton Reitschel, and from old Von Donaustauf I had also been able to obtain certain missing links concerning the intrigue. Reitschel, a burly, round-faced, fair-haired Prussian of quite superior type, held the position of Chief Director of the German-Ottoman Bank in Constantinople. His duty for the past three years had been to conciliate the Sultan and to lend German money to any industrial enterprise in which any grain of merit could possibly be discovered. He had been singled out, taken from the Dresdner Bank, and sent to Constantinople by the Kaiser in order to play Germany's secret game in Turkey--especially that of the Bagdad Railway--and to combat with German gold Great Britain's diplomacy with Tewfik Pasha and old Abdul Hamid, in view of "The Day," which the Emperor had long ago determined should soon dawn. Was he not the War-Lord? And must not a War-Lord make war? As old Von Donaustauf had put it, between the whiffs of one of those exquisite cigarettes, a consignment of the Sultan's own which came from the Yildiz Kiosk to Potsdam weekly: "Our Emperor intends that, notwithstanding Britain's policy in the Near East, Germany shall soon rule from Berlin to Bagdad. Herr Reitschel is in reality charged with the work of "Germanizing" the Ottoman Empire." That I already knew by the many secret reports of his which arrived so constantly from Constantinople, reports which showed quite plainly that though the great German Embassy, with its huge eagles of stone set at each end, might have been built for the purpose of impressing the Turks, yet the shrewd, farseeing Herr Anton, as head of that big financial corporation, held greater sway at that rickety set of offices known to us as the Sublime Porte than did his Excellency the Ambassador, with all his beribboned crowd of underlings. Truly the game which the Emperor was playing in secret against the other Powers of Europe was a crooked and desperate one. On the one hand the Kaiser was making pretence of fair dealing with Great Britain and France, yet on the other his agent, Herr Reitschel, was ever busy lending money in all directions, and bribing Turkish officials in order to secure their favour in Germany's interest.