Page:Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.djvu/289

Rh topics. According to my record of this talk, written out at the time, the German Ambassador discussed almost every subject except the one upon which I had called.

"This act of the Turks will greatly injure Germany —" I would begin.

"Do you know that the English soldiers at Gaba Tepe are without food and drink?" he would reply. "They made an attack to capture a well and were repulsed. The English have taken their ships away so as to prevent their soldiers from retreating —"

"But about this Gallipoli business," I interrupted. " Germans themselves here in Constantinople have said that Germany should stop it —"

"The Allies landed 45,000 men on the peninsula," Wangenheim answered, "and of these 10,000 were killed. In a few days we shall attack the rest and destroy them."

When I attempted to approach the subject from another angle, this master diplomatist would begin discussing Rumania and the possibility of obtaining ammunition by way of that country.

"Your Secretary Bryan," he said, "has just issued a statement showing that it would be unneutral for the United States to refuse to sell ammunition to the Allies. So we have used this same argument with the Rumanians; if it is unneutral not to sell ammunition, it is certainly unneutral to refuse to transport it!"

The humorous aspects of this argument appealed to Wangenheim, but I reminded him that I was there to discuss the lives of between 2,000 and 3,000 non-combatants. As I touched upon this subject again, Wangenheim replied that the United States would not be acceptable to Germany as a peacemaker now, because