with Christmas, for on that day it is customary for Mohammedans to exchange small presents, usually sweets. So after the usual remarks of felicitation, I said to Enver:
"To-day is Bairam and you haven't sent me any present yet."
Enver laughed.
"What do you want." Shall I send you a box of candies?"
"Oh, no," I answered, "I am not so cheap as that. I want the pardon of the seven Armenians whom the court-martial has condemned at Smyrna."
The proposition apparently struck Enver as very amusing.
"That's a funny way of asking for a pardon," he said. "However, since you put it that way, I can't refuse."
He immediately sent for his aide and telegraphed to Smyrna, setting the men free.
Thus fortuitously is justice administered and decision involving human lives made in Turkey. Nothing could make clearer the slight estimation in which the Turks hold life, and the slight extent to which principle controls their conduct. Enver spared these men not because he had the slightest interest in their cases, but simply as a personal favour to me and largely because of the whimsical manner in which I had asked it. In all my talks on the Armenians the Minister of War treated the whole matter more or less casually; he could discuss the fate of a race in a parenthesis, and refer to the massacre of children as nonchalantly as we would speak of the weather.
One day Enver asked me to ride with him in the
