William II is sick, nervous and irritable.  He has lost all patience with the question of the reform of military organisation; he did not raise that question, it would seem, and has plenty of other things to worry him.  He is going to ask Parliament, on its re-assembling, to vote large sums for the increase of the navy, his own particular care.  After all, he received the army triumphant from the hands of Moltke and of Bismarck, but the navy is his own personal achievement; he believes this, and says so repeatedly.  But the German navy has no luck.  This year, besides the Iltis, the Frauenlob, and the Amazone, which swallowed up a large number of junior officers of the Prussian navy, it has lost the Kurfurstin (as the result of an error of navigation) with 300 sailors, also the Augusta, the Undine, and other vessels.

February 22, 1897. [5]

William II has announced himself as the enemy of Greece, and the prop of the Ottoman Empire.  At the subscription ball given at the Opera in Berlin, did he not walk arm-in-arm with Ghalik Bey, the Turkish Ambassador, and authorise him to telegraph to the Sultan that, under existing conditions, he might count upon his sense of justice and his good-will?  Does not this constitute an insolent challenge to the decision which the Powers are supposed to have taken for the observation of neutrality?

When William II is insolent, he does not do things by halves; now, he repeats to all concerned:  “One does not argue with Greece, one gives her orders,” and on every occasion that has offered, he has displayed sentiments hostile to Greece and favourable to the Sultan.  For these reasons, Abdul Hamid is devoted to William II.  He is tied to him, and bound by all his sentiments, by all his admiration and his fear, to the Germans.  Messrs. Cambon and de Nelidoff believed that they had detached the Sultan from Germany, but illusions on that score are no longer possible.  Germany possesses his entire confidence.  Did not he, the most nervous and suspicious of men, allow on one occasion the German military mission to take effective command of his troops, whereas no other military mission has ever been allowed anything more than the right to put them through their drill?  Germany, which in case of need can count upon the Turkish army, is fundamentally interested in preventing Turkey from being either weakened or divided up.  A war in the East, in which Germany might get Russia deeply involved, at the same time that she kept her busy in Asia, is too great an advantage to risk losing, without doing everything possible to protect it. . . .

April 28, 1897. [6]