Page:Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.djvu/452

384 sailors carried the bier upon their shoulders, other German sailors carried the huge bunches of flowers, and all members of the diplomatic corps and the officials of the Turkish Government followed on foot.

The Grand Vizier led the procession; I walked the whole way with Enver. All the officers of the Goeben and the Breslau, and all the German generals, dressed in full uniform, followed. It seemed as though the whole of Constantinople lined the streets, and the atmosphere had some of the quality of a holiday. We walked to the grounds of Dolma Bagtche, the Sultan's Palace, passing through the gate which the ambassadors enter when presenting their credentials. At the dock a steam launch lay awaiting our arrival, and in this stood Neurath, the German Conseiller, ready to receive the body of his dead chieftain. The coffin, entirely covered with flowers, was placed in the boat. As the launch sailed out into the stream Neurath, a six-foot Prussian, dressed in his military uniform, his helmet a waving mass of white plumes, stood erect and silent. Wangenheim was buried in the park of the summer embassy at Therapia, by the side of his comrade Colonel Leipzig. No final resting-place would have been more appropriate, for this had been the scene of his diplomatic successes, and it was from this place that, a little more than two years before, he had directed by wireless the Goeben and the Breslau, and safely brought them into Constantinople, thus making it inevitable that Turkey should join forces with Germany, and paving the way for all the triumphs and all the horrors that have necessarily followed that event.