In contrast to Talaat, who is at least intelligent enough to keep up appearances and cunning enough to hold himself well in the background, Enver's personal lack of integrity in money matters is a subject of most shameful knowledge in Constantinople. It is pretty well generally known how he has made use of his position as Military Dictator to gain possession for himself of property worth thousands of pounds, and how in his financial dealings with Germany hundreds have found their way into his own pocket--up till the winter of 1915-1916, according to an estimate from confidential Turkish circles and from German sources I will not name, he had already managed to collect something like two million pounds, reckoned in English money. This son of a former lowly _conducteur_ in the service of the Roads and Bridges Board, whose mother, as I have been assured by Turks is the case, plied in Stamboul the much-despised trade of "layer-out" of corpses, now lives in his Konak in more than princely luxury, with flowers and silver and gold on his table, having married, out of pure ambition, a very plain-looking princess. That is the true portrait of this much-coddled darling of the Young Turks, and latterly of the German people as well. This is the idol of so many admiring German women, who are bewitched by his more than adventurous career and the halo surrounding him which he has enhanced by every known and unknown means of self-advertisement. Enver's character won for him in "Committee" circles personal dislike and bitter, though veiled, enmity even from his colleagues who were of exactly the same political persuasion as himself. Of his relations towards the infinitely more important Djemal Pasha we have already spoken; we shall speak in a moment of his relations to Talaat. In the world of the retired military men, however, who had been badgered about by Enver, neglected and simply forcibly pensioned off by hundreds before the war because of their divergent political opinions, and even thrown into the street, the War Minister was heartily hated. A very large part of them were of the same political views as the murdered successor to the throne, and their opinion of the Great War was as we have already indicated. They pointed bitterly to Enver as the all-too-pliable servant of Germany, who was only too ready to sacrifice the flower of Ottoman youth on those far battlefields of Galicia at a sign from the German Staff, and open door after door to German influence in the Interior without even attempting to protect the land of his fathers from invasion and decay.