Lastly, the Great War should teach us, in other respects too, not to underrate those who became our adversaries owing to the mistake they made in joining the Central Powers. For the “Sick Man” raised an army of nearly 1,600,000 men, about a million of whom belonged to fighting units, and the alliance of Turkey with Germany was a heavy blow to the Allied Powers: Russia was blockaded, the Tsar Ferdinand was enabled to attack Serbia, the blockade of Rumania brought on the peace of Bukharest, Turkish troops threatened Persia, owing to which German emissaries found their way into Afghanistan, General Kress von Kressenstein and his Ottoman troops attacked the Suez Canal, etc. All this gave the Allies a right to enforce on Turkey heavy terms of peace, but did not justify either the harsh treatment inflicted upon her before the treaty was signed, or some of the provisions of that treaty. It would be a great mistake to look upon Turkey as of no account in the future, and to believe that the nation can no longer play an important part in Europe. Footnotes: 7: _Midhat Pacha, Sa vie et son œuvre_, by his son Ali-Haydar-Midhat Bey (Paris, 1908). 8: Janina was occupied by Greece in 1912-18. 9: Cf. A. Boppe, _Les Peintres du Bosphore au dix-huitième siècle_ (Paris, 1919). III TURKEY AND THE WAR It is a well-known fact that Germany, while carefully organising the conflict that was to lay waste the whole world and give her the hegemony of the globe, had not neglected Turkey. Her manœuvres ended, before the war, in concluding a Turco-German treaty of alliance, signed in Constantinople at four o’clock in the afternoon of August 2, 1914, by Baron von Wangenheim and the Grand Vizier Said Halim, an Egyptian prince, cousin to the former Khedive of Egypt and Mehemet Ali’s grandson. It seems that the Turkish negotiators had plainly told the German representatives that they only meant to fight against Russia, and they did not even require any guarantee against the action of France and England. The spirit in which these negotiations were carried on has been lately corroborated by a statement of M. Bompard, former French Ambassador at Constantinople, who, in answer to a newspaper article concerning the circumstances under which Turkey entered into the war, and the episode of the _Goeben_ and the _Breslau_,[10] wrote in the same newspaper:[11] “Owing to the treaty of August 2, Turkey was ipso facto a belligerent; yet though the military authorities acted in conformity with the treaty, the civil authorities—_i.e._, the Government, properly speaking—had a somewhat different attitude. In the first place, the Government denied it was at war with France and England. The Grand Vizier had even made a formal declaration of neutrality in Paris and London; it only had to do with Russia; besides, the thing was not urgent, as the Russian decree of mobilisation had just been issued.”