From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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]