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office.
    For the moment, however, Talaat and Enver and their friends had control and they were determined to keep it by any kind of ruthlessness, by any kind of bargaining.
    These then were the young men who in August 1914 were putting Turkey up to auction, and they were opposed—perhaps abetted is an apter word—by the group of
professional western diplomats who were making the bidding. Unlike the Young Turks, the men at the foreign embassies in Constantinople were not strange at all. Here everything was perfectly
distinct and familiar. One knows at sight the Ambassador, the Dragoman (the political adviser), the Military Attaché, the head of Chancery, and the swarm of secretaries, just as one knows
the pieces in chess and what moves they are capable of making. All is in order and the different nationalities are as easily distinguished as red is from black.
    Yet in one respect at least the Ambassador of 1914 differed from his counterpart of the present time: he had more authority, much more freedom of action. It was not often that he was
overshadowed by the sort of international conferences which now occur every other week, nor was his work being constantly overlooked by cabinet ministers and politicians coming out from home. His
brief may have been prepared for him, but he interpreted it in his own way. It was a long journey from Western Europe to Turkey, and the approaching war had made Constantinople doubly remote. It
really was possible for an ambassador by some gesture, by some decision taken on his own authority, toalter the balance of things, perhaps even to retard or to accelerate
Turkey on the path to war. Then too the ‘eastern-ness’ of the Ottoman Empire, its differences of every kind in religion and in manners and culture, were much more exaggerated then than
they are now. The Embassy became an outpost, a stronghold, the one really solid physical symbol of a nation’s place in the world. It had to be large—larger if possible than the other
rival embassies—and the ambassador must have the presence of an important man. He must have his flag, his servants in livery, his yacht in the Golden Horn, and his summer embassy at Therapia
in addition to his more formal palace in Constantinople. All this tended to set the diplomats in Constantinople very much apart from Turkey, and no doubt they felt more at home with one another
than they did with the Turks. The ambassadors and their staffs, indeed, were often to be seen together at the international club: and the attitudes which they took towards the Turks were much as
one would have expected.
    ‘Sir Louis Mallet, the British Ambassador,’ says Morgenthau, ‘was a high-minded and cultivated English gentleman: Bompard, the French Ambassador, was a singularly charming
honourable Frenchman, and both were constitutionally disqualified from participating in the murderous intrigues which then comprised Turkish politics. Giers, the Russian Ambassador, was a proud and
scornful diplomat of the old régime. . . . It was apparent that the three ambassadors of the Entente did not regard the Talaat and Enver régime as permanent, or as particularly worth
their while to cultivate.’
    There was one other man who was extremely influential in the Allied camp. This was Fitzmaurice, the Dragoman of the British Embassy. T. E. Lawrence had met Fitzmaurice in Constantinople before
the war and wrote the following note about him: 1
    ‘The Ambassadors were Lowther 2 (an utter dud) and Louis Mallet who was pretty good and gave fair warning of the trend of feeling. I blame much of
our ineffectiveness upon Fitzmaurice,the Dragoman, an eagle-mind and a personality of iron vigour. Fitzmaurice had lived half a lifetime in Turkey and was the Embassy’s
official go-between and native authority. He knew everything and was feared from end to end of Turkey. Unfortunately he was a rabid R.C. and hated Freemasons and Jews with a religious hatred. The
Young Turk movement was