Now, far-distant as Turkey is from mid-Europe, Germany’s policy with regard to her is an integral and essential part of the Mittel-Europa scheme. It is precisely that which some of our Western politicians have completely missed. Because Turkey is not the immediate link in the chain that is designed to connect Berlin with Egypt and India, they think that it has nothing to do with that chain, and will find out to the infinite cost of the country whose eyes and intelligence they are supposed to be, that once given that Germany succeeds in obtaining a peace based on the apparent reasonableness of the formula “no annexations,” she will by her “spheres of influence” in Bulgaria, Roumania, the Ukraine, and Turkey, have pushed her frontiers to the edge of the Persian Gulf. There is nothing that Mittel-Europa politicians would like better than to conclude a peace to-day on the basis of no annexations, for, technically, she has not annexed the Ottoman Empire (any more than she has annexed Poland, to whom she has several times granted “independence”). But the effect would be that while we should have to clear out of Mesopotamia and Palestine, we should leave her in literal no less than in virtual possession of the lands between the Sea of Marmora and the Persian Gulf. That is what “no annexation” means to Germany, and on such a basis that is what she has already acquired, and if the unfathomable ignorance of certain sections of the English press gives any indication of the ignorance of the nation with regard to Turkey, its ignorance in the event of a peace at all in agreement with German ideas would be very speedily instructed. Those who maintain that Turkey is a nation of peaceful and gentlemanly agriculturists, harassed in the past by the unwarrantable aggression of Russia, and now desirous only of being left to live a calm and Arcadian existence, are merely not aware that Turkey at the present time has no existence except as a military province of Germany, an acquisition of the very astute politicians of the Mittel-Europa school, who have hoodwinked them as completely as they have hoodwinked Turkey itself. Without for a moment suggesting that these blunt arrows for Turkey’s defence have been supplied by Germany, it is at least reasonable to be amazed at the confidence with which a guileless Grub-street bowman faces the triumphant advance of the Central Empires.