From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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]