191 3] My Influence in Mussulman India 409 



Benckendorf and he thinks that war will begin on Monday evening. 

 . . . The Great Powers want the Allies to exhaust themselves before 

 stepping in. Germany is sincere in her desire to avert a war and 

 has her eye on Asia Minor. We will remain on in Egypt and attempt 

 to annex it. . . . The Turks have been getting in guns and money 

 recently from Germany.' 



" 18th Feb. — A letter from George Wyndham, four sheets long, 

 telling of his son Percy's engagement to Ribblesdale's daughter, Diana 

 Lister. He is much excited about it. 



" 21st Feb. — A black melancholy is on me caused by a sense of my 

 failure every where in life. My poetry, my Eastern politics, my Arab 

 horse breeding, were strings to my bow and they have one after an- 

 other snapped, and to-day looking through my memoirs I perceive how 

 slackly they are written and how unworthy they are of survival. Yet 

 the diaries are full of things too important for me to destroy and they 

 overwhelm me with despair. 



" 22nd Feb. — Syud Mahmud writes from Benares telling me that 

 the whole Moslem community in India has now adopted my views in 

 connection with the Turco-Bulgarian War and the complicity of our 

 Government in the intrigue with Russia against Islam, and I see in 

 the Reuter's telegrams of to-day that the ferment is beginning to alarm 

 the Government of India. Syud Mahmud ends thus, ' Your most kind 

 and pathetic letter has touched me very much and I actually wept. 

 Your sentence " my long advocacy of Islam has been a complete fail- 

 ure," is most touching as coming from one who has spent the best 

 years of his life in fighting for Moslems and then this is the conclusion 

 he arrives at. . . . You say your advocacy has ceased to exercise any 

 influence even on Mohammedans. I say it has just begun. They now 

 realize the true meaning of what you told them years ago, because they 

 are shaking off a bit of their slavishness, developed since the mutiny 

 of 1857. Your articles in ' Egypt ' are widely read here. They are 

 translated and reproduced in the vernacular papers. If possible, please 

 write a long article, a sort of appeal to the Mussulmans, telling them 

 what they should do in the future. It will greatly influence them.' 

 This is an unexpected encouragement. 



" 23rd Feb. — Belloc's friend, Cecil Chesterton, is to be prosecuted 

 for criminal libel in the ' Eye Witness ' by the Samuel family, and 

 Belloc is a bit uneasy for himself too. He declares that there will 

 be war this year between France and Germany, in consequence of 

 Germany's increasing armaments which force the French to call out 

 one man in three as compared to the German one man in four, and 

 the French will not stand being conscripted to that amount, they prefer 

 fighting. 



" 1st March. — Gertrude, Lady Kenmare, is dead, once a considerable 



