CHAPTER III

THE "BAGDADBAHN"

In the development of her _Weltpolitik_, the most formidable, the most feasible, and the most successful conception of modern Germany has been the economic penetration of Asiatic Turkey. She may have failed in Africa and in China. But there can be no doubt about the successful beginning, and the rich promise for the future, of German enterprises in the Ottoman Empire.

The countries of sunshine have always exercised a peculiar fascination over the German. His literature is filled with the Mediterranean and with Islam. From his northern climate he has looked southward and eastward back towards the cradle of his race, and in imagination has lived over again the Crusades. As long as Italy was under Teutonic political influence, the path to the Mediterranean was easy. United Italy and United Germany were born at the same time. But while the birth of Italy threatened to close eventually the trade route to the Mediterranean to Germany, the necessity of a trade route to the south became more vital than ever to the new German Confederation from the sequences of the union.

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When her political consolidation was completed and her industrial era commenced, Germany began to look around the world for a place to expand. There were still three independent Mohammedan nations--Morocco, Persia, and Turkey. In Morocco she found another cause for conflict with France than Alsace-Lorraine. In Persia and Turkey, she faced the bitter rivalry of Russia and Great Britain.

The rapid decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the fact that its sovereign was Khalif of the Moslem world, led German statesmen to believe that Constantinople was the best place in the world to centre the efforts of their diplomacy in the development of the _Weltpolitik_. Through allying herself with the Khalif, _Germany would find herself able to strike eventually at the British occupation of India and Egypt, and the French occupation of Algeria and Tunis, not only by joining the interests of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Germanism, but also by winning a place in Morocco opposite Gibraltar, a place in Asia Minor opposite Egypt, and a place in Mesopotamia opposite India_.

The certainty of economic success helped to make the political effort worth while, even if it came to nothing. For Asia Minor and Mesopotamia are countries that have been among the most fertile and prosperous in the whole world. They could be so again. The present backward condition of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is due to the fact that these countries have had no chance to live since they came under Ottoman control, much less to develop their resources proportionately to other nations. The {60} natives have been exploited by the Turkish officials and by foreign holders of concessions. Frequently concessions have been sought to stop, not to further, development. If there have been climatic changes to account for lack of fertility in Asia Minor, this is largely due to deforestation. Ibn Batutah, the famous Moorish traveller of the first half of the fourteenth century, and Shehabeddin of Damascus, his contemporary, have left glowing accounts of the fertility and prosperity of regions of Asia Minor, now hopelessly arid, as they existed on the eve of the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. Not only have all the trees been cut down, but the roots have been torn up for fuel! One frequently sees in the markets of Anatolian towns the roots of trees for sale. The treatment of trees is typical of everything else. The country has had no chance. In Mesopotamia, the new irrigation schemes are not innovations of the twentieth century, but the revival of methods of culture in vogue thousands of years before Christ.

The Romans and Byzantines improved their inheritance. The Osmanlis ruined it.

In addition to sunshine and romance, political advantages, and prospects of making money, another influence has attracted the Germans to the Ottoman Empire. There is a certain affinity between German and Osmanli. The Germans have sympathy with the spirit of Islam, _as they conceive it to be interpreted_ in the Turk. They admire the _yassak_ of the Turk, which is the counterpart of their _verboten_. The von Moltke who later led Prussia to her great victories had at the beginning of his career an intimate knowledge {61} of the Turkish army. He admired intensely the blind and passive obedience of the Turk to authority, his imperturbability under misfortune and his fortitude in facing hardship and danger. "Theirs not to reason why: theirs but to do and die" is a spirit which German and Turk understand, and show, far better than Briton, with all due respect to Tennyson. A Briton may obey, but he questions all the same, and after the crisis is over he demands a reckoning. Authority, to the Anglo-Saxon, rests in the body politic, of which each individual is an integral--and ineffaceable--part.

The Turkish military and official cast is like that of the Germans in three things: authority rests in superiors unaccountable to those whom they command; the origin of authority is force upholding tradition; and the sparing of human life and human suffering is a consideration that must not be entertained when it is a question of advancing a political or military end. I have seen both at work, and have seen the work of both; so I have the right to make this statement. For all that, I have German and Turkish friends, and deep affection for them, and deep admiration for many traits of character of both nations. The trouble is that the people of Germany and the people of Turkey allow their official and military castes to do what their own instincts would not permit them to do. The passivity of the Turk is natural: it is his religion, his background, and his climate. The passivity of the German is inexcusable. He will not exorcise the devil out of his own race. It must be done for him.

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In 1888, a group of German financiers, backed by the Deutsche Bank, which was to have so powerful a future in Turkey, asked for the concession of a railway line from Ismidt to Angora. The construction of this line was followed by concessions for extension from Angora to Cæsarea and for a _branch_ from the Ismidt-Angora line going south-west from Eski Sheir to Konia. The extension to Cæsarea was never made. That was not the direction in which the Germans wanted to go. The Eski Sheir-Konia spur became the main line. The Berlin-Bagdad-Bassorah "all rail route" was born. The Germans began to dream of connecting the Baltic with the Persian Gulf. The Balkan Peninsula was to revert to Austria-Hungary, and Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to Germany. The south Slavs and the populations of the Ottoman Empire would be dispossessed (the philosopher Haeckel actually prophesied this in a speech in 1905 before the Geographical Society of Jena). Russia would be cut off from the Mediterranean. This was the Pan-Germanist conception of the _Bagdadbahn_.

From the moment the first railway concession was granted to Germans in Asia Minor, which coincided with the year of his accession, Wilhelm II has been heart and soul with the development of German interests in the Ottoman Empire. His first move in foreign politics was to visit Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1889, when he was throwing off the yoke of Bismarck. This visit was the beginning of an intimate connection between Wilhelmstrasse and the Sublime Porte which has never been interrupted--excepting {63} for a very brief period at the beginning of the First Balkan War. The friendship between the Sultan and the Kaiser was not in the least disturbed by the Armenian massacres. The hecatombs of Asia Minor passed without a protest. In fact, five days after the great massacre of August, 1896, in Constantinople, where Turkish soldiers shot down their fellow-citizens under the eyes of the Sultan and of the foreign ambassadors, Wilhelm II sent to Abdul Hamid for his birthday a family photograph of himself with the Empress and his children.

In 1898, the Kaiser made his second voyage to Constantinople. This voyage was followed by the concession extending the railway from Konia to the Persian Gulf. It was the beginning of the _Bagdadbahn_ in the official and narrower sense. After this visit of the Kaiser to Abdul Hamid, the pilgrimage was continued to the Holy Land. At Baalbek, there is a stone of typically German taste, set in the wall of the great temple, to commemorate the visit of the man who dreamed he would one day be master of the modern world. If this inscription seems a sacrilege, what name have we for the large gap in the walls of Jerusalem made for his triumphal entry to the Holy City? The great Protestant German Church, whose corner-stone was laid by his father in 1869, was solemnly inaugurated by the Kaiser. As solemnly, he handed over to Catholic Germans the title to land for a hospital and religious establishment on the road to Bethlehem. Still solemnly, at a banquet in his honour in Damascus, he turned to the Turkish Vali, and declared: "Say to the three hundred million {64} Moslems of the world that I am their friend." To prove his sincerity he went out to put a wreath upon the tomb of Saladin.

Wilhelm II at Damascus is reminiscent of Napoleon at Cairo. Egypt and Syria and Mesopotamia have always cast a spell over men who have dreamed of world empires; and Islam, as a unifying force for conquest, has appealed to the imagination of others before the present German Kaiser. I have used the word "imagination" intentionally. There never has been any solidarity in the religion of Mohammed; there is none now; there never will be. The idea of community of aims and community of interests is totally lacking in the Mohammedan mind. Solidarity is built upon the foundation of sacrifice of self for others. It is a virtue not taught in the Koran, nor ever developed by any Mohammedan civilizations. The failure of all political organisms of Mohammedan origin to endure and to become strong has been due to the fact that Mohammedans have never felt the necessity of giving themselves for the common weal. The virility of a nation is in the virile service of those who love it. If there is no willingness to serve, no incentive to love, how can a nation live and be strong?

The revelation of Germany's ambition by the granting of the concession from Konia to the Persian Gulf, and the application of the German financiers for a _firman_ constituting the Bagdad Railway Company, led to international intrigues and negotiations for a share in the construction of the line through Mesopotamia. It would be wearisome and profitless {65} to follow the various phases of the Bagdad question. Germany did not oppose international participation in the concession. The expense of crossing the Taurus and the dubious financial returns from the desert sections influenced the Germans to welcome the financial support of others in an undertaking that they would have found great difficulty in financing entirely by their own capital. The _Bagdadbahn_ concession was granted in 1899: the _firman_ constituting the company followed in 1903.

Russia did not realize the danger of German influence at Constantinople, and of the eventualities of the German "pacific penetration" in Asia Minor. She adjusted the Macedonian question with Emperor Franz Josef in order to have a free hand in Manchuria, and she made no opposition to the German ambitions. She needed the friendly neutrality of Germany in her approaching struggle with Japan. Once the struggle was begun, Russia found herself actually dependent upon the goodwill of Germany. It was not the time for Petrograd to fish in the troubled waters of the Golden Horn.

The situation was different with Great Britain. The menace of the German approach to the Persian Gulf was brought to the British Foreign Office just long enough before the Boer crisis became acute for a decision to be made. Germany had sent engineers along the proposed route of her railway. She had neglected to send diplomatic agents!

The proposed--in fact the only feasible--terminus on the Persian Gulf was at Koweit. Like the Sultan of Muscat, the Sheik of Koweit was practically {66} independent of Turkey. While showing deference to the Sultan as Khalif, Sheik Mobarek resisted every effort of the Vali of Bassorah to exercise even the semblance of authority over his small domain. In 1899, Colonel Meade, the British resident of the Persian Gulf, signed with Mobarek a secret convention which assured to him "special protection," _if he would make no cession of territory without the knowledge and consent of the British Government_. The following year, a German mission, headed by the Kaiser's Consul General at Constantinople, arrived in Koweit to arrange the concession for the terminus of the _Bagdadbahn_. They were too late. The door to the Persian Gulf was shut in the face of Germany.

Wilhelm II set into motion the Sultan. The Sublime Porte suddenly remembered that Koweit was Ottoman territory, and began to display great interest in forcing the Sheik to recognize the fact. A Turkish vessel appeared at Koweit in 1901. But British warships and British bluejackets upheld the _independence_ of Koweit! Since the Constitution of 1908, all the efforts of the Young Turks at Koweit have been fruitless. Germany remains blocked.

British opposition to the German schemes was not limited to the prevention of an outlet of the _Bagdadbahn_ at Koweit. In 1798, the East India Company established a resident at Bagdad to spy upon and endeavour to frustrate the influence of the French, just beginning to penetrate towards India through the ambition of Napoleon to inherit the empire of Alexander. Since that time, British interests have not failed to be well looked after in Lower Mesopotamia. {67} After the Lynch Brothers, in 1860, obtained the right of navigating on the Euphrates, the development of their steamship lines gradually gave Great Britain the bulk of the commerce of the whole region, in the Persian as well as the Ottoman _hinterland_ of the Gulf. In 1895, German commerce in the port of Bushir was non-existent, while British commerce surpassed twelve million francs yearly. In 1905, the market was shared about equally between Great Britain and Germany. In 1906, the Hamburg-American Line established a service to Bassorah. British merchants began to raise the cry that if the _Bagdadbahn_ appeared the Germans would soon have not only the markets of Mesopotamia but also that of Kermanshah. The Lynch Company declared that the _Bagdadbahn_ would ruin their river service, and their representations were listened to at London, despite the absurdity of their contention. The Lynches were negotiating with Berlin also. This mixture of politics and commerce in Mesopotamia is a sordid story, which does not improve in the telling.

The revolution of 1908 did not injure the German influence at Constantinople as much as has been popularly supposed. The Germans succeeded during the first troubled year in keeping in with both sides through the genius of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, in spite of the Bosnia-Herzegovina affair. Germany was fortunately out of the Cretan and Macedonian muddles, in which her rivals were hopelessly entangled. Mahmud Shevket pasha was always under German influence, and the Germans had Enver bey, "hero of liberty," in training at Berlin. {68} German influence at Constantinople succeeded also in withstanding the strain of the Tripolitan War, although it grew increasingly embarrassing as the months passed to be Turkey's best friend and at the same time the ally of Italy! During the first disastrous period of the war of the Balkan Allies against Turkey, it seemed for the time that the enemies of Germany controlled the Sublime Porte. But the revolver of Enver bey in the _coup d'état_ of January, 1913, brought once more the control of Turkish affairs into hands friendly to Germany. They have remained there ever since.

Germany strengthened her railway scheme, and her hold on the territories through which it was to pass, by the accord with Russia at Potsdam in 1910.

The last clever attack of British diplomacy on the _Bagdadbahn_ was successfully met. In tracing the extension of the railway beyond Adana, it was suggested to the Department of Public Works that the cost of construction would be greatly reduced and the usefulness of the line increased, if it passed by the Mediterranean littoral around the head of the Gulf of Alexandretta. Then the control of the railway would have been at the mercy of the British fleet. When the "revised" plans went from the Ministry of Public Works to the Ministry of War, it was not hard for the German agents to persuade the General Staff to restore the original route inland across the Amanus, following the old plan agreed upon in the time of Abdul Hamid. More than that, the Germans secured concessions for a branch line from Aleppo to the Mediterranean at Alexandretta, {69} and for the construction of a port at Alexandretta. The _Bagdadbahn_ was to have a Mediterranean terminus at a fortified port, and Germany was to have her naval base in the north-east corner of the Mediterranean, eight hours from Cyprus and thirty-six hours from the Suez Canal! This was the revenge for Koweit.

A month before the Servian ultimatum, Germany had contracted to grant a loan to Bulgaria, one of the conditions of which was that Germany be allowed to build a railway to the Ægean across the Rhodope Mountains to Porto Laghos, and to construct a port there, six hours from the mouth of the Dardanelles. There was a panic in Petrograd.

The events in Turkey since the opening of the war are too recent history and as yet too little understood to dwell upon. But the reception accorded to the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ at the Dardanelles, their present[1] anomalous position in "closed waters" in defiance of all treaties, the abolition of the foreign post-offices, the unilateral decision to abrogate the capitulations--all these straws show in which direction the wind is blowing on the Bosphorus. A successful termination of the German campaign in France, which at this writing seems most improbable (in spite of the fact that the Germans are at Compiègne and their aëroplanes pay us daily visits), would certainly draw Turkey into the war--and to her ruin.[2]

[1] October, 1914.

[2] This chapter was written before the sudden and astonishing acts of war by Turkey in sinking a Russian ship and bombarding Russian Black Sea ports on October 29, 1914.

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On the other hand, the German reliance upon embarrassing the French and British in their Moslem colonies through posing as the defenders of Islam and Islam's Khalif has not been well-founded. On the battlefield of France, thousands of followers of Mohammed from Africa and Asia are fighting loyally under the flags of the Allies. The Kaiser, for all his dreams and hopes, has not succeeded in getting a single Mohammedan to draw his sword for the combined causes of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Islamism. Have the three hundred million Moslems forgotten the declaration of Damascus?

In seeking for the causes of the present conflict, it is impossible to neglect Germany in the Ottoman Empire. As one looks up at Pera from the Bosphorus, the most imposing building on the hill is the German Embassy. It dominates Constantinople. There has been woven the web that has resulted in putting Germany in the place of Great Britain to prevent the Russian advance to the Dardanelles, in putting Germany in the place of Russia to threaten the British occupation of India and the trade route to India, and in putting Germany in the place of Great Britain as the stubborn opponent of the completion of the African Empire of France. The most conspicuous thread of the web is the _Bagdadbahn_. In the intrigues of Constantinople, we see develop the political evolution of the past generation, and the series of events that made inevitable the European war of 1914.

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