From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

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, misrepresented, 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: