CHAPTER VII

THE BAGDAD RAILWAY

_In its political and military, not to speak of its commercial, consequences, the securing by Germany of the Bagdad Railway is perhaps the most important event which has occurred in the Old World since the Franco-Prussian War._[150] ANDRÉ CHÉRADAME.

At Konia, anciently Iconium, we reached the junction of the Anatolia and the Bagdad Railways. From an economic and military standpoint, both roads are of supreme importance to the Ottoman Empire. They supply commerce with long needed means of communication between the interior and the seaboard, and enable the Sultan to conduct the administration of his extensive territory with far more efficiency and despatch than was before possible. Politically, however, the Bagdad Railway is incomparably still more important. No great railroad has ever attracted more attention; none has ever owed so much to its name; none has ever so fired the imagination of Germans and Ottomans; and none has ever so exhausted the resources of diplomacy or provoked greater struggles for its control. Historically both roads have a special interest to the student and the historian not only on account of the classic lands through which they pass but also on account of the long and strenuous efforts which several rival nations made to obtain from the Sublime Porte the authorization to build and operate the great road which was to unite the West and the East.

So greatly has the Bagdad Railway modified the Near Eastern Question, so completely has it changed the data and the consequent solution of the problem, and so perfectly does its history dovetail into the narrative of our journey, that a brief account of the origin and struggling beginnings of the road is necessary to a clear conception of many things that shall be said in subsequent chapters.

Many and diverse, as the ambitions of those who gave them birth, have been the projects to unite by rail the superb capital on the Bosphorus with the mysterious city of Harun-al-Rashid on the distant Tigris.

Two-thirds of a century ago there were few projects which were proposed with more insistence to the British Cabinet and to the House of Commons as well as to English capitalists than that which had for its object the construction of a railway which, starting from a point on the Mediterranean, should cross Mesopotamia in the direction of India.

The original plan called for an overland route which would connect the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. It was based on an elaborate survey of the Euphrates valley, which had been made by an English officer, Colonel Chesney, in 1835–1837. The primary object was to shorten the journey from England to India, which was then made across the Isthmus of Suez, or round the Cape of Good Hope.

The preliminary survey of this contemplated line was made by order of the British Government which voted £20,000 for expenses. Materials for two armed steamers were, under the direction of Colonel Chesney, transported with almost insuperable difficulties from the mouth of the Orontes to the Euphrates. This gallant officer had under his command a well-equipped staff of engineers and men of science, and the work which the expedition set out to execute was performed, as the official reports show, in the most thorough manner. More than two years were devoted to the task of exploring the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the region through which they flowed, and the enthusiastic commander felt sure his labors were to issue “in the consolidation and perfection of the overland communications between Great Britain and India.”[151]

But how quickly and completely his illusions were dispelled!

When I returned from the East in 1837 [he wrote long after] it was with the full belief that a question of such vast importance to Great Britain--nationally, politically and commercially--would be at once taken up warmly by the Government and the public. The way had been opened--difficulties which at one time had looked formidable had been overcome; the Arabs and the Turkish Government were favorable to the projected line to India. But thirty-one years have since passed, and _nothing has been done_.[152]

In 1851 a company was organized in England for realizing Colonel Chesney’s plan for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf. A firman was obtained from the Porte and everything was ready for beginning work--except cash. As the enterprise was not supported by the government, English capitalists considered participation in it too hazardous to justify investment. The company’s concession lapsed for lack of the necessary funds.

The question was again taken up in 1872 and referred to a Parliamentary commission. But, although Colonel Chesney’s plan of building a road along the Euphrates was favorably received, it was again abandoned--this time in favor of the Suez Canal, a large interest in which had been purchased for England by her astute premier, Disraeli, who was quick to perceive the paramount value of this passageway between England and her possessions in the Orient.[153]

During many years thereafter this new route between Asia and Europe so absorbed public attention that the Euphrates Railway was almost forgotten. But towards the end of the century numerous projects for constructing the road were taken up by several groups of promoters and financiers of different nationalities.

Among these was the project of an Italian, Sig. A. Tonietti, who,

## acting in behalf of a company of Italian and English financiers, sought

a concession for the construction of a line which should start from Alexandretta on the Mediterranean and which, following the Euphrates to Bagdad and Basra, should terminate at a point on the Persian Gulf. He also sought a concession for building a number of branch lines, one of which was to extend to Khanikin on the Persian frontier. In addition to this he asked for authorization to cultivate the unoccupied government lands along the course of the railroad during the term of the concession. In return for this authorization he agreed to establish an irrigation system which should restore the Euphrates valley to its pristine fertility.

There was also a French group of financiers who, headed by M. Cottard, a distinguished railroad engineer in Turkey, endeavored by all means in their power to secure a concession for building a railway which was to be a prolongation of the Anatolian line to Bagdad and Basra and to follow essentially the same course along the Euphrates as the projected road of Sig. Tonietti.

In addition to the two projects just mentioned was that of the Russian Count Kapist, who proposed to build a line which should start from Tripoli, in Syria, and, passing Bagdad, should terminate at Koweit on the Persian Gulf. Count Kapist and his associates pretended that they were assured of the eventual coöperation not only of English capitalists but also of the British Government.[154]

The applicants for these divers concessions were, however, all doomed to disappointment. Never before had so many, so antagonistic, and so powerful interests made so long and so strenuous efforts to secure the coveted privilege of building a railroad in foreign territory. Never were diplomats more active in Constantinople, never was intrigue more complicated, and never was greater pressure brought to bear upon the Sublime Porte by the rival nations of Europe. France wished to safeguard her interests in the Levant and extend her sphere of influence in the Near East. Russia desired to tighten her hold on Transcaucasia and to prepare for the eventual dismemberment of the Turkish Empire of which she fondly hoped to secure the lion’s share. England, although she had control of the Suez Canal, saw in the Bagdad Railway a menace to her Indian possessions and determined to nullify the danger before it was too late.

France had been on the friendliest terms with the Ottoman Government since the time of Francis I and her financiers naturally felt that the much coveted concession should be awarded to them as citizens of the most favored nation. English capitalists put forward claims which they regarded as deserving greater consideration than those of their competitors.

But French and English as well as Italian and Russian claims were ignored, their projects for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf were rejected and the long and eagerly sought concession was awarded to a group of German capitalists, _alias_ the Deutsche Bank, _alias_, their opponents contend, the German Government.

What the Germans call _Drang nach Osten_--Trend towards the East--dates from the time of Alexander the Great. It drove the legions of the Cæsars to the Euphrates and the Tigris and impelled the hosts of the Crusaders to seek glory on the desert wastes of Syria and Mesopotamia. It urged Napoleon to undertake his famous campaign in Egypt and was at the bottom of his alliance with the Czar Alexander I--an alliance that was to carry the combined armies of France and Russia to the heart of India.

As to the Germans, they have never ceased “to dream of the _Morgenland_ since the epic of Barbarossa’s crusade and the legendary disappearance of that great figure of Teutonic battle and romance in the Cilician stream.” When von Moltke, 1835–1839, was assisting the Sultan Mahmud II to reorganize the Ottoman army on the German plan he was greatly impressed with the possibilities offered by Asia Minor as a field for German commerce and enterprise. Others of his countrymen thought it would be good policy to divert the current of German emigration from America to Asia Minor. And, although the Porte had always been opposed to all schemes of German colonization in Turkey, there was reason to believe that the Ottoman Government, after the completion of the Bagdad Railway, would consent to German colonists settling in certain places in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. For, several decades before the Germans had secured the concession to build the Bagdad Railroad, the friendliest relations had existed between Constantinople and Berlin. This was particularly true after the defeat of France in 1870, when Germany was reorganized as the first military power in the world. For thenceforward Turkey not only maintained a goodly number of military students in Germany, but also had many German officers in her army, among whom was the distinguished Field Marshal Goltz Pasha.

It was, however, more than a half century before von Moltke’s idea of developing Anatolia and Mesopotamia was given practical consideration. It was then taken up by Dr. George von Siemens, the distinguished president of the Deutsche Bank, who, like so many of his countrymen, had come under the spell of Germany’s _Weltpolitik_ and, like them, had been caught in the current of the _Drang nach Osten_.

Dr. von Siemens was not only one of the ablest of the group of eminent men whom the Kaiser had gathered about him, but was also a great favorite of the German War Lord. He not only shared von Moltke’s views regarding the development of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, but, with rare clearness of vision, saw that this development could be achieved only by the construction of a railway through the broad wastes which lay between the Bosphorus and the Persian Gulf. To reclaim for civilization the long-neglected valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris and to restore to their ancient splendor the broad and fertile plains of Anatolia and Mesopotamia--so long the favored home of humanity--became his dominant ambition, and to the achievement of his cherished project he directed for years, with marvelous address and persistency, his indomitable energy and _savoir faire_. Slowly but surely his dream began to be realized.

Before the Anatolian Railway was completed the Turkish Army was eating bread made from Russian flour; now it is using grain grown in the fertile acres of Asia Minor. And before the advent of the railroad the communications between the interior of Asia Minor and the seaboard were so wretched that the freight on domestic grain was greater than on that imported from Russia or the United States. The result was that the Anatolian peasants then grew only enough wheat for their own needs. Before the advent of the railroad not a single ton of grain from the region traversed by the Anatolian Railroad reached the seacoast for export. After the road was completed the export of wheat and other cereals became, in a very short time, an important item of commerce. The peasantry received “for their harvests from twice to four times the prices formerly paid and the railways brought revenue to the (Ottoman) treasury.”[155]

The cost of the railway was great, indeed, but greater far was its value to Turkey, for it was not only the best but also the only practical means of “bringing the disjointed members of that large empire within reach of control,” and of “bringing security and cultivation, order and civilization, to a country that once had been the most fertile on earth.”[156]

That Germany should have received the concession for building the Bagdad Railway in the face of such strong competitors as Russia, France, and England was a great surprise to those who were not familiar with the relations among the Great Powers and who were not well informed respecting the diplomatic game as it was then played in Constantinople. To those, however, who had an accurate knowledge of the strained relations which existed between the Porte and certain of the western nations and who knew how suspicious Abdul-Hamid II was of all schemes affecting Turkey, which were engineered in Russia or Great Britain, or in behalf of Russian or British interests, the outcome of the long diplomatic game at the Porte was looked upon as a foregone conclusion.

A brilliant French publicist attributes the success of the Germans in securing the concession for the Bagdad Railway to the fact that the era of great ambassadors from France and England at the Sublime Porte was closed at the period in question--that in the year immediately preceding “the publication of the irade of the concession in 1899,” there was then “an utter bankruptcy of great men” at Constantinople from these two countries.[157]

Opposed to the English, French, and Russian Ambassadors, and almost isolated from his colleagues, was the alert and sagacious Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, the noted ambassador from Germany who, according to an anonymous writer in the _National Review_, “was the most influential of the ambassadors at Yildiz, and, in accordance with the thoroughly sensible and practical cast of German ideas as to the functions of diplomacy, had used his position more actively and successfully than any minister had done before to promote the business interest of his nationals in Turkey.”[158]

Not to speak of the failure of France and Russia to secure the concession for building the Bagdad Railway, it may here be declared that England’s hopes of securing it were doomed from the very beginning. Her control of the Suez Canal and her occupation of Egypt, which was the territory of a Turkish vassal, not to speak of Gladstone’s denunciation of the Sultan as the “Great Assassin,” all predisposed Abdul-Hamid in favor of Germany and as strongly predisposed him against Great Britain.

A writer in the _National Review_, referring to this subject, declares:

For many years the immobile Turk had never been so likely to go out of his way for any purpose in the world as when an opportunity to do the English Government a discourtesy or English influence a disservice; and it may almost be said that even a bribe worthy of the fabulous wealth of the detested island would not have induced Abdul-Hamid to give to an Englishman what he could give to any one else.[159]

When it was officially announced that the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway had been granted to a German syndicate, there was great jubilation from the Rhine to the Vistula over what was regarded as a great victory for Teutonic diplomacy and enterprise. The enthusiastic sons of the Fatherland fancied that they already saw the well-equipped trains of the Bagdad Railway “running in the track of Alexander” from the Dardanelles to the embouchure of the Shatt-el-Arab, and exulted in the thought that “where the Mermnadæ, the Achæmenidæ, and the Greek, Roman, Arabic, and Turkish conquerors failed, there Germany had a good prospect of success.”[160]

In Turkey the diplomatic victory of the Germans meant a great exaltation of Teutonic prestige and a corresponding diminution of the credit and influence of the defeated Powers.

In France, the predominant position of power and influence acquired by Germany was interpreted as a complete subversion of the Eastern Question and as an event which made the solution of this long-standing question correspondingly difficult--“_ce qui boulverse complètment les données du problème et par consequent sa solution possible_.”[161]

France [writes M. Aublé] had long been the disinterested protector of a nation whose moral and material elevation she had constantly sought and had spent in all branches of human

## activity of that unfortunate country many milliards of francs.

What she loved to regard as a second France, she saw with sorrow was about to escape her and come under the influence of a hated rival.[162]

Russia’s attitude toward the Bagdad Railway was no less hostile. It had, for obvious reasons, been her policy since the time of Peter the Great to weaken and eventually dismember the Ottoman Empire. Her objection to the road was that it contributed immeasurably to the financial, political, and strategical strength of Turkey, and that this would completely foil all her well-laid plans for her ultimate

## partition. She also regarded the road as a menace to Transcaucasia,

but, more than this, she feared that it would, in the possession of Germany, halt her further advance into Western Asia and prove, mayhap, a stepping-stone to Germany’s annexation of Asia Minor.

But the resentment of Great Britain was far greater than that of either France or Russia. She had more at stake and greater reasons for serious apprehension for the future. So long as she controlled the Suez Canal and there was no competing line towards India she felt secure. But when, in 1888, Baron Hirsch’s Railroad through the Balkan Peninsula was completed to the Bosphorus and connected Constantinople with Western Europe, and steps were taken to extend this line through Anatolia and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, alarm, bordering on dismay, took possession of her publicists and statesmen.

The political and military importance of an overland railway from the Bosphorus to the Persian Gulf which could not be reached by a hostile fleet could not be overestimated.

Indeed [as a noted English authority wrote in 1917] so long as the forts of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus remain intact the Sultan and his allies enjoy the advantages of a naval power in a limited area--the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles--without the possession of a fleet. This enables the Sultan and his Germanic allies rapidly to convey troops or foodstuffs from Europe to Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia and _vice versa_, in the very face of the Allied Fleets, which are powerless to interfere in areas protected by defences which had proved, as one had to expect they would prove, impregnable.[163]

Another English writer saw in German control of the Bagdad Railway the doom of English trade and French enterprise in the Near East.

Is the same fate [he asks] to be meted out to the French railways in Syria as that which has overtaken the non-German railways in Asia Minor? Are they to be absorbed into the Bagdad Railway, or be cut off from any prospects of development? On the further side of the area, are the British communications up the Tigris to be starved into submission, and is the trade of Manchester and our great industrial centers to be placed at the mercy of variable by-laws in the statutes of railway companies owned or largely controlled by Germany? In the present temper of British diplomacy, a German victory of this kind is, I am sorry to say, not outside the bounds of possibility, however momentous may be the consequences, not only to our trade but also to our whole political future. If it be achieved, German enterprise will dominate the countries west of India and will extend along two great arms to the frontiers of Egypt and to the head of the Persian Gulf. Regions lying upon the main line of the maritime communications of the British Empire will gradually, but none the less irrevocably, become invested with a political complexion and bias out of harmony with our vital interests.[164]

But this was not all. Judging by the articles that filled the English press after the concession for building the Bagdad Railway had been granted to Germany, the great fear of many in England was that this concession would lead to a protectorate over Turkey by the Teutonic Powers;[165] that it “would permanently diminish English credit in the East and throughout all Islam” and exalt German prestige at Britain’s expense; that it involved the ousting of England from their “former political and commercial primacy in the Ottoman Empire”; that, to quote a British writer, it would “squeeze us out of Asiatic Turkey,” as the diplomacy of Germany had “succeeded in squeezing us out of East Africa where we surrendered to her territory which was ours by virtue of having been explored by Speke, Grant and Stanley.”[166]

In the meantime the Teutonic Powers were trying to secure the necessary capital for their stupendous enterprise. From the very beginning of their vast undertaking they, under the lead of Dr. Siemens, president of the Administrative Board of the Anatolian Railway, fully realized the difficulties they would encounter in securing the funds requisite to cover the enormous cost of their colossal work. But to achieve success they had recourse to all the methods of shrewd business and sane diplomacy. And they were quick to perceive that the wisest and safest policy would be to work along the line of least resistance. Instead, therefore, of antagonizing their defeated competitors they would invite them to coöperate with them in the construction and operation of the great steel highway. They would, in a word, internationalize it and make it a purely commercial enterprise, whose sole object would be the expansion of western trade and the development of the fabulous resources of the mysterious East.

But, as the concessionaires soon discovered to their surprise and disappointment, this was more easily said than done. The story of their many and long negotiations with foreign capitalists and statesmen is a long one and reveals, as few other things have done, national jealousies, distrusts, and ambitions. Each of the nations concerned desired to have the lion’s share in the building and management of the road, and, when this was impossible, those who had perforce to accept minor parts, or none at all, strove by every means in their power, covertly or openly, to misrepresent the object of the undertaking and damn it in the estimation of those who were counted on to coöperate in carrying the enterprise to a successful conclusion.

Neither the French nor the English government was willing to give the Bagdad Railway project official recommendation. This attitude of the two governments deterred many capitalists from investing in an enterprise which they had been disposed to view most favorably. The French Government went so far as to forbid the securities to be listed on the Bourse.[167]

But the chief opposition to the project came not so much from the governments in question as from the press. This was particularly the case in England.

A letter written in 1903 by the late Sir Clinton Dawkins--one of a group of English capitalists who were eager to coöperate with the Germans in the building of the Bagdad Railway--to Herr Arthur von Gwinner, the successor of Dr. von Siemens as director of the road, leaves no doubt about this whatever.

The fact is [Sir Clinton writes] that the business has become involved in politics here, and has been sacrificed to the very violent and bitter feeling against Germany exhibited by the majority of our newspapers and shared in by a large number of people.

This is a feeling which, as the history of recent events will show you, is not shared by the Government or reflected in official circles. But of its intensity outside those circles, for the moment, there can be no doubt; at the present moment coöperation in any enterprise which could be represented, or, I might more justly say, _mis_represented, as German will meet with a violent hostility which our government has to consider.... The anti-German feeling prevailed with the majority; London having really gone into a frenzy on the matter, owing to the newspaper campaign which it would have been quite impossible to counteract or influence.[168]

As a result of an important meeting of Potsdam between the Czar and the Kaiser in November 1910, Russia waived all share in the Bagdad Railway. The reason for this withdrawal was, it is asserted, the willingness of Germany to allow Russia to build a railway in the north of Persia which should eventually connect with a branch of the Bagdad Railway at Khanakin on the Persian frontier.

The reason, therefore, why the Bagdad Railway was not internationalized, as was the desire of Dr. Siemens and his associates, is manifest. The nations constituting the _Entente Cordiale_ were unwilling to accept the offer of the _concessionaires_, who thereafter proceeded to construct the line without outside assistance.[169]

When the statesmen and financiers of France and England found that internationalization of the Bagdad Railway was impossible and that the Germans were preparing to build it without their coöperation they bethought themselves of killing the enterprise by creating a financial vacuum:

“Let a vacuum of capital be created around the Bagdad Railway,” ironically writes M. André Geraud, who had no sympathy with the methods his countrymen and their English allies had adopted in their dealings with the German _concessionaires_, “let the Anglo-French air-pump be set in action, and then, as soon as the pecuniary oxygen becomes rarefied, the Bagdad Railway will be seen to languish and die.”[170]

But this method, it was soon discovered, utterly failed to have the desired effect. It neither deprived the railway company of resources nor checked its activity. “The air-pump,” as M. Geraud wittily remarks, “broke down as soon as it was started.”[171]

The time had passed when it could be truthfully said that the Bagdad Railway could not be built by a single power. The same statement had been made regarding the Suez Canal, but France, under the lead of De Lesseps, showed what the enterprise and the genius of her people were capable of accomplishing when they were united in an undertaking that was to reflect on them imperishable glory and redound at the same time to the welfare of humanity.

Confident in their ability to construct the Bagdad Railway unaided, the Germans, under the guidance of able financiers, were not long in demonstrating to the world that their enterprise was in no wise inferior to that which led to the magnificent achievement of the French in the Land of the Pharaohs.

The hostile attitude of the Anglo-French press towards the Bagdad Railway was not allowed to pass unnoticed by the publicists of Germany. From the day that the irade authorizing the building of the great railroad was issued they had been enthusiastic about the enterprise that was, they felt sure, to be of inestimable advantage to the Fatherland. They descanted especially on it as an agency for developing German trade in the Near East, whose commerce hitherto had been almost entirely in the hands of their rivals. They fondly pointed to the day, in the not distant future, when they would be able to exploit the vast mineral riches of Asia Minor, and when Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, as a result of intensive culture under German direction, would be able to supply them with untold stores of grain, wool, cotton, fruit, petroleum, and other commodities; when, thanks to their control of the Bagdad Railway and its branches, they would enjoy a virtual monopoly of near eastern commerce.

The eminent German engineer, Wilhelm von Pressel, who had served the Fatherland so long and so well in the Ottoman Empire,[172] prepared plans for connecting Europe with Asia by a tunnel under the Bosphorus. But his fellow countryman, Siegmund Schneider, insisted that the two continents should be connected by a bridge, which he describes in a dithyrambic fashion which most vividly exhibits the exaltation of the promoters of the great Berlin to Bagdad Railway.

The architectural effect [Herr Schneider writes] of the metallic mass richly gilded, suspended from massive piers, crowned by glittering cupolas and minarets, brilliantly illuminated at night would be fantastic. This bridge would constitute a formidable closure of the enfilade of fortified works with which the Turkish coasts bristle. Its debouches in Asia and Europe would be defended by powerful bridge-heads, its piers would be armed with armored rotary batteries whose long range would infallibly sink any squadron that would venture into the Strait.... The express trains of the future will go directly from Berlin to Babylonia in five days.[173]

German engineers confidently asserted that the day was not far distant when trains _de luxe_ equal to any in Europe or America would cover the distance between Constantinople and Bagdad in sixty-five hours. The time formerly required to make the journey between these two cities by caravan was from fifty to fifty-five days.[174]

Nor was this an empty boast. No road has ever been more carefully or more solidly built than is the Bagdad Railway. Roadbed, culverts, revetments, bridges are of the strongest and most durable materials. The sleepers are of metal, while the steel rails are specially made for sharp curves and fast and heavy trains. German engineers declare that they are the heaviest in existence. At a time when the heaviest rails used in the United States weighed one hundred pounds per lineal yard, those selected for the Bagdad Railroad weighed twenty per cent more. And so it is with the warehouses, the offices, and especially the stations all along the line. So massive are the last-named structures that they are called “German Castles.” Indeed, it is the firm conviction of many that these buildings were so designed that they might serve as strongholds in emergencies, such as sudden uprisings of lawless nomads or fanatical Moslems. Nothing was left to chance. So far as experience and engineering science could forecast the necessities of the future, provision was made for all eventualities--save only such a cataclysm as a world war, which threatened to interrupt the continuity of civilization.

As to the end and aim of the Bagdad Railway we are left in no doubt.

We must [writes Professor Diering] be true to ourselves by emphasizing and cultivating everything German. In all undertakings engineered by German diplomacy and financed with German money the official language must be German. Hence French, which has been the official language on Turkish Railways, must disappear. There must be a German school near every large railway station; and in these schools both the German and Turkish languages must be employed in giving instruction; any other language will be merely taught. Only specially selected and well-educated teachers should be sent to Turkey. Above all, German medical men must be introduced into Turkey’s railway system. They are the best medium for spreading German influence and for awakening esteem and affection for Germany.

On broad lines it is now quite clear what form the future Turkish Empire will assume. From Tripolis across to Persia and on to the ridges of the Caucasus, German energy--without injury to the sovereignty of the Osmanic State--will coöperate in Turkey’s renaissance and in the development of her treasures. But our enemies, together with their money, languages and schools will disappear from the territories which they hoped to divide among themselves.[175]

Equally explicit is another German writer, Herr Trampe, respecting the ulterior object of the Bagdad Railway.

The ancient highroad of the world [he declares] is the one which leads from Europe to India--the road used by Alexander--the highway which leads from the Danube _via_ Constantinople to the valley of the Euphrates, and by northern Persia, Herat, and Kabul to the Ganges. Every yard of the Bagdad Railway which is laid brings the owner of the railway nearer to India. What Alexander performed and Napoleon undoubtedly planned can be achieved by a third treading in their footsteps. England views the Bagdad Railway as a very real and threatening danger to herself--and rightly so. She can never undo or annul its effects.[176]

The increasingly hostile attitude of the _Entente Cordiale_ toward the Bagdad Railway, the violent ebullitions of the press of the rival powers portended trouble. No sooner had the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway been officially announced than it began to weigh as a nightmare on a great part of Europe. The chancelleries of the Old World began then to realize more clearly than ever before the boundless possibilities of the great oriental highway. English statesmen saw in it the virtual doubling of the German fleet at the head of the Persian Gulf, and then the cry was heard throughout Britain, “Let us have the Russians at Constantinople rather than a great power on the Persian Gulf.”

The Bagdad Railway [declares an English writer] was a _damnosa hæreditas_, which was due as much to a lack of imagination and effective organization on the part of our business community in the eighties and nineties of the last century, as it undoubtedly was to a mistaken policy in those critical years on the part of the British Government.[177]

Small wonder, then, is it that the Bagdad Railway was from the very beginning of the great World War considered as one of the chief contributing causes of the terrific cataclysm of the second decade of the twentieth century and that, whatever political, economic, and social adjustments may be entailed as a result of the most stupendous struggle of history, it is destined to modify even more profoundly the relations between the Orient and the Occident than did the far-reaching campaigns of Alexander the Great, which introduced Greek people and Greek culture to the East and made known to the West the riches and the wonders of Persia and India and Babylonia.

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