European powers trained native language cadets to replace unreliable dragomans

Evidence

Most of the European powers decided, sooner or later, that they could no longer rely on these people, and that the only real answer was to train people of their own. And so young Englishmen, young Frenchmen, young Austrians, young Russians—these being the four Powers mainly concerned—were assigned to learn the language. There is a long and interesting story about how attempts were made and finally succeeded—to some extent. The French began with what they called ‘les jeunes de langue’, a jeune de langue being a kind of language cadet. They were sent from France, where they had some preliminary training in a Middle Eastern language, and then attached as what we would nowadays call, I suppose, interns, to the French embassy. The Austrians at one stage even insisted that their ambassador must speak Turkish. The Russians, according to the tes­ timony of Adolphus Slade, one of the best British observers, had a much simpler method: when they wanted something, they would say ‘Do so or I will declare war’ and this, apparently, was normally effective. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 184

Categorization

• CANDY: The Russian diplomatic method — ‘do so or I will declare war’ — is a wonderfully dry, tweetable anecdote.