[23] Via the Bagdad Railway and the Syrian system Turkish troops could have been transported to a point less than 200 miles from Suez. A successful attack on the Canal, of course, would have severed British communications with the East. In addition, it would have given the Sultan an opportunity to attack, and assert his suzerainty over, Egypt. Dr. Rohrbach made a great point of this alleged menace to the British position in Egypt. Cf. Die Bagdadbahn, pp. 18–19; German World Policies, pp. 165–167. This program, however, would have been an altogether too ambitious one for the military strength of the Ottoman Empire, which had such far-flung frontiers to defend. In any event, British statesmen seemed to realize that the Sinai Peninsula was a formidable natural defence against an attack on the Suez Canal and that such an expedition would be merely a pin-prick in the imperial flesh. Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, fifth series, Volume 7 (1911), pp. 601 et seq. The termination in a fiasco of the Turkish drive of 1914–1915 against the Canal confirmed this prophecy.
[24] Infra, p. 83; Kurt Wiedenfeld, Die deutsch-türkische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen (Leipzig, 1915), p. 23; Report of the Bagdad Railway Company, 1908, pp. 4–5.
[25] Cf., e.g., K. Helfferich, Die deutsche Türkenpolitik, p. 22.
[26] Persia and the Persian Question, Volume I, p. 634.
CHAPTER III
GERMANS BECOME INTERESTED IN THE NEAR EAST
The First Rails Are Laid
During the summer of 1888 the Oriental Railways—from the Austrian frontier, across the Balkan Peninsula via Belgrade, Nish, Sofia, and Adrianople, to Constantinople—were opened to traffic. Connections with the railways of Austria-Hungary and other European countries placed the Ottoman capital in direct communication with Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London (via Calais). The arrival at the Golden Horn, August 12, 1888, of the first through express from Paris and Vienna was made the occasion of great rejoicing in Constantinople and was generally hailed by the European press as marking the beginning of a new era in the history of the Ottoman Empire. To thoughtful Turks, however, it was apparent that the opening of satisfactory rail communications in European Turkey but emphasized the inadequacy of such communications in the Asiatic provinces. Anatolia, the homeland of the Turks, possessed only a few hundred kilometres of railways; the vast areas of Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Hedjaz possessed none at all. Almost immediately after the completion of the Oriental Railways, therefore, the Sultan, with the advice and assistance of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, launched a program for the construction of an elaborate system of railway lines in Asiatic Turkey.[1]
The existing railways in Asia Minor were owned, in 1888, entirely by French and British financiers, with British capital decidedly in the predominance. The oldest and most important railway in Anatolia, the Smyrna-Aidin line—authorized in 1856, opened to traffic in 1866, and extended at various times until in 1888 it was 270 kilometres in length—was owned by an English company. British capitalists also owned the short, but valuable, Mersina-Adana Railway, in Cilicia, and held the lease of the Haidar Pasha-Ismid Railway. French interests were in control of the Smyrna-Cassaba Railway, which operated 168 kilometres of rails extending north and east from the port of Smyrna. It was not until the autumn of 1888 that Germans had any interest whatever in the railways of Asiatic Turkey.[2]
The first move of the Sultan in his plan to develop railway communication in his Asiatic provinces was to authorize important extensions to the existing railways of Anatolia. The French owners of the Smyrna-Cassaba line were granted a concession for a branch from Manissa to Soma, a distance of almost 100 kilometres, under substantial subsidies from the Ottoman Treasury. The British-controlled Smyrna-Aidin Railway was authorized to build extensions and branches totalling 240 kilometres, almost doubling the length of its line. A Franco-Belgian syndicate in October, 1888, received permission to construct a steam tramway from Jaffa, a port on the Mediterranean, to Jerusalem—an unpretentious line which proved to be the first of an important group of Syrian railways constructed by French and Belgian promoters. Shortly afterward the concession for a railway from Beirut to Damascus was awarded to French interests.[3]