seized would strengthen the hands of the Opposition by enabling it to finance mobilization on the eastern frontier without resort to German money.
In this, Rauf spoke not only for the political Opposition but for the strong British and French traditions in Constantinople to which Enver's course was a source of genuine grief. Rauf says, however, that the British Embassy made him no reply. To quote his precise words: "England made every effort to get Honduras, Paraguay and Greece into the war on the side of the Allies, but for us she had no word." The Emperor of India and the Caliph had parted company in 1907. Great Britain remained true to its commitments to Russia. Enver's Pan-Turanianism may have been impractical or not, but to any Ottoman Government, whether headed by Enver or Rauf, there were only two courses in the face of Russia—either to defend itself or to cease to exist. The Enver Government secured its loans from Germany on the only terms on which it could get them and if those terms involved war against Great Britain, it illy becomes British statesmen to complain. It was not the Enver Government which drew up the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
German naval officers hustled the Enver Government to a break by bombarding Odessa and dropping the mined nets which closed the Straits, thus banging and bolting the Black Sea gate to Russia as their own Navy in the north had already banged and bolted Russia's Baltic gate. The Caliph proclaimed a Holy War against all Christians except Germans and Austrians, a proclamation which presumably was intended to wreck British India but
