Page:Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.djvu/442

 "Where's Kitchener's army?

"We are willing to surrender Belgium now," he went on. "Germany intends to build an enormous fleet of submarines with great cruising radius. In the next war, we shall therefore be able completely to blockade England. So we do not need Belgium for its submarine bases. We shall give her back to the Belgians, taking the Congo in exchange."

I then made another plea in behalf of the persecuted Christians. Again we discussed this subject at length.

"The Armenians," said Wangenheim, "have shown themselves in this war to be enemies of the Turks. It is quite apparent that the two peoples can never live together in the same country. The Americans should move some of them to the United States, and we Germans will send some to Poland and in their place send Jewish Poles to the Armenian provinces—that is, if they will promise to drop their Zionist schemes."

Again, although I spoke with unusual earnestness, the Ambassador refused to help the Armenians.

Still, on July 4th, Wangenheim did present a formal note of protest. He did not talk to Talaat or Enver, the only men who had any authority, but to the Grand Vizier, who was merely a shadow. The incident had precisely the same character as his proforma protest against sending the French and British civilians down to Gallipoli, to serve as targets for the Allied fleet. Its only purpose was to put Germans officially on record. Probably the hypocrisy of this protest was more apparent to me than to others, for, at the very moment when Wangenheim presented this so-called protest, he was giving me the reasons why