Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/243

 the political situation in the Orient at the present time?" If, in spite of the paucity of the information with which I am addressing you, I do not say "No" it is because I fear the inference that I have much to suppress, and because such an inference is always disquieting, especially when it is coupled with the desire to make capital out of my silence. I am the more pleased to address you with complete frankness, because the interpellation and the way it was introduced have given me the impression that if the German policy wishes to correspond to the majority opinion of the Reichstag—in so far as I may consider the recent comments an expression of this opinion—it has only to continue along the path which it has thus far followed.

Regarding the present situation, I suspect that you already know everything I can say about it. You know from the press and the English parliamentary debates that at present one can say in the Orient, "The arms are idle, and the storms of war are hushed"—God grant, for a long while! The armistice which has been concluded grants the Russian army an unbroken position from the Danube to the sea of Marmora, with a base which it lacked formerly. I mean the fortresses near the Danube. This fact, which is nowhere denied, seems to me to be the most important of the whole armistice. There is excluded from the Russian occupation, if I begin in the north, a quadrangular piece, with Varna and Shumla, extending along the shore of the Black Sea to Battshila in the north, and not quite to the Bay of Burgas in the south, thence inland to about Rasgrad—a pretty exact quadrangle. Constantinople and the peninsula of Gallipoli are also excluded, the very two points on whose independence of Russia several interested powers are laying much stress.

Certain peace preliminaries preceded the armistice, which at the risk of telling you things you already know I shall nevertheless review because they will answer the question whether German interests are at stake in any one of them. There is, in the first place, the establishment of