That dramatic event which finally alienated me from the German cause took place just after the end of a severe crisis in my relationship with German-Turkish Headquarters. Some slight hints I had given of Turkish mismanagement, cynicism, and jingoism in a series of articles appearing from February 15th, 1916, onwards, under the title "Turkish Economic Problems," so far as they were possible under existing censorship conditions, was the occasion of the trouble. One can imagine that Headquarters would certainly be furious with a journalist whose articles appeared one fine day, literally translated, in the _Matin_ under the title: "_Situation insupportable en Turquie, décrite par un journaliste allemand_" ("Insufferable situation in Turkey, described by a German journalist"), and cropped up once more on June 1st, in the _Journal des Balcans_, I was three times over threatened with dismissal. My paper sent a confidential man to hold an inquiry, and after a month he made a confidential report, which resulted in my being allowed to remain. But the fact that the same journalist that wrote such things was married to a Czech was too much for my colleagues, who were in part in the pay of the Embassy, in part in the pay of the Young Turkish Committee, whose politics they praised, regardless of their own inward convictions, like the representative of the _Berliner Tageblatt_, to get material benefit or make sure of their own jobs. I gleaned many humorous details at a nightly sitting of my Press colleagues in Pera, at which I myself was branded as a "dangerous character that must be got rid of," and my wife (who was far too young ever to worry about politics) as a "Russian spy"--perhaps because, with the justifiable pride and reserve of her race, she did not attempt to cultivate the society of the German colony. That began the period of intrigues and ill-will, but my enemies did not succeed in damaging me, although matters went so far as a denunciation of me before the "Prevention of Espionage Department" of the General Staff in Berlin. My paper, after they had given me the fullest moral satisfaction, and had arranged for me to remain in Constantinople in spite of all that had taken place, thought it was better to give me the chance of changing and offered me a new post on the editorial staff elsewhere. However, I was now quite finished with Germany, or rather with its politics; it would have been a moral impossibility for me to write another single word in the editorial line; so I refused the offer and applied for sick-leave from October 1st, 1916, to the end of the war (by telegram about the middle of August). It was granted me with an expression of regret.