London, 18 December 1876 

Dear Hermann, 

I have safely received your two letters of 14 and 17 November, 
made the appropriate entries and found the statement of the 
account to be correct, save for an item I had not previously been 
advised of —payment of 90.68 marks to Emil Blank on 24 January 
1876. I presume this is the total of the amounts I owed him for 
various consignments of wine sent to me through his firm over 
here. In which case this, too, is in order. 

I return herewith the Indian paper; the characters are badly 
defaced Devanagari or Sanskrit characters,”° which is why I was 
only able to read one word; it’s a kind of long-hand, whereas all 
I’ve come across is printed characters. It would seem to be a 
Central Indian dialect, since in the North they mostly use Arabic 
characters. 

True, I have again been allotted another £600 gas shares at par 
(which show me a profit of about 60-70 per cent) but on the other 
hand sundry Americans came my way at the last drawing, so that 

14* 

at the moment I don’t need any money other than the interest due 
to me. Since, however, all my gas companies will be issuing new 
shares or debentures in the course of this year, it’s very nice for 
me to know that I can call on you at any time for £300-£500; for 
sometimes the whole amount has to be paid up at once and that 
means getting hold of money quickly. 

Many thanks for your information about Schaaffhausen.* I had 
rather suspected that the rumours I had heard were exaggerated; 
however, Mevissen’s resignation from the board might well be a 
sign that the rats have begun to desert the ship. 

I am positive that war is not far off.”°? The Russians have got so 
deeply implicated that they can no longer turn back, and the 
Turks will, of course, resist any incursion into their territory. 
Come what may, England will protect Constantinople and the 
Straits, though we've by no means reached that stage yet, and I’m 
convinced that the Turks will best cope with the Russians if they 
are left to fend for themselves. The position between the Danube 
and the Balkans is one of the strongest in Europe, and as long as 
no railways or highways are built there, the strength of a Russian 
army that could be employed and provisioned there, would be 
limited to a maximum of, say, a hundred to a hundred and fifty 
thousand men at the outside. Hence it will probably be a 
protracted war fought out within the quadrilateral of fortresses 
Ruschuk, Silistria, Varna, Shumla,” and this the Turks are better 
able to withstand than the Russians. All that Bulgaria’s so-called 
autonomy boils down to is the expulsion of the Turks from this 
strong position and the exposure of Constantinople to a Russian 
invasion. And the Turks, of course, aren’t going to let themselves 
be bullied into this by any conference.”” If you'd like to know 
exactly what obstacles the Russians will encounter there, give 
yourself a Christmas present in the shape of Moltke’s Russo- 
Turkish Campaign of 1828/29, Berlin 1845.7 It’s a very good book 
which will, at the same time, provide you with the specialised maps 
you will need for the impending war. This time it will be different 
from 1828 in that: 

1. the Turks have an army, 

2. Silistria, Ruschuk, etc., are ringed with modern, detached 
FORTS, 

3. the Turks have, after the English, the most powerful fleet of 
iron-clads, and are in complete control of the Black Sea, 

a Schaaffhausen Bank Association - > Bulgarian names: Ruse, Silistra, Varna, 
Shumen (now Kolarovgrad). - © [H. K. B.] von Moltke, Der russisch-ttirhische Feldzug 
in der europdischen Türkei 1828 und 1829. -4 1836 in the original 

4. the Russian Army is in the throes of reorganisation and 
hence hardly fit for war. 

Love to Emma and the children, and the compliments of the 
season from 

Your 
Friedrich