“Let a vacuum of capital be created around the Bagdad Railway,” ironically writes M. André Geraud, who had no sympathy with the methods his countrymen and their English allies had adopted in their dealings with the German concessionaires, “let the Anglo-French air-pump be set in action, and then, as soon as the pecuniary oxygen becomes rarefied, the Bagdad Railway will be seen to languish and die.”[170]
But this method, it was soon discovered, utterly failed to have the desired effect. It neither deprived the railway company of resources nor checked its activity. “The air-pump,” as M. Geraud wittily remarks, “broke down as soon as it was started.”[171]
The time had passed when it could be truthfully said that the Bagdad Railway could not be built by a single power. The same statement had been made regarding the Suez Canal, but France, under the lead of De Lesseps, showed what the enterprise and the genius of her people were capable of accomplishing when they were united in an undertaking that was to reflect on them imperishable glory and redound at the same time to the welfare of humanity.
Confident in their ability to construct the Bagdad Railway unaided, the Germans, under the guidance of able financiers, were not long in demonstrating to the world that their enterprise was in no wise inferior to that which led to the magnificent achievement of the French in the Land of the Pharaohs.
The hostile attitude of the Anglo-French press towards the Bagdad Railway was not allowed to pass unnoticed by the publicists of Germany. From the day that the irade authorizing the building of the great railroad was issued they had been enthusiastic about the enterprise that was, they felt sure, to be of inestimable advantage to the Fatherland. They descanted especially on it as an agency for developing German trade in the Near East, whose commerce hitherto had been almost entirely in the hands of their rivals. They fondly pointed to the day, in the not distant future, when they would be able to exploit the vast mineral riches of Asia Minor, and when Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, as a result of intensive culture under German direction, would be able to supply them with untold stores of grain, wool, cotton, fruit, petroleum, and other commodities; when, thanks to their control of the Bagdad Railway and its branches, they would enjoy a virtual monopoly of near eastern commerce.
The eminent German engineer, Wilhelm von Pressel, who had served the Fatherland so long and so well in the Ottoman Empire,[172] prepared plans for connecting Europe with Asia by a tunnel under the Bosphorus. But his fellow countryman, Siegmund Schneider, insisted that the two continents should be connected by a bridge, which he describes in a dithyrambic fashion which most vividly exhibits the exaltation of the promoters of the great Berlin to Bagdad Railway.
The architectural effect [Herr Schneider writes] of the metallic mass richly gilded, suspended from massive piers, crowned by glittering cupolas and minarets, brilliantly illuminated at night would be fantastic. This bridge would constitute a formidable closure of the enfilade of fortified works with which the Turkish coasts bristle. Its debouches in Asia and Europe would be defended by powerful bridge-heads, its piers would be armed with armored rotary batteries whose long range would infallibly sink any squadron that would venture into the Strait.... The express trains of the future will go directly from Berlin to Babylonia in five days.[173]
German engineers confidently asserted that the day was not far distant when trains de luxe equal to any in Europe or America would cover the distance between Constantinople and Bagdad in sixty-five hours. The time formerly required to make the journey between these two cities by caravan was from fifty to fifty-five days.[174]
Nor was this an empty boast. No road has ever been more carefully or more solidly built than is the Bagdad Railway. Roadbed, culverts, revetments, bridges are of the strongest and most durable materials. The sleepers are of metal, while the steel rails are specially made for sharp curves and fast and heavy trains. German engineers declare that they are the heaviest in existence. At a time when the heaviest rails used in the United States weighed one hundred pounds per lineal yard, those selected for the Bagdad Railroad weighed twenty per cent more. And so it is with the warehouses, the offices, and especially the stations all along the line. So massive are the last-named structures that they are called “German Castles.” Indeed, it is the firm conviction of many that these buildings were so designed that they might serve as strongholds in emergencies, such as sudden uprisings of lawless nomads or fanatical Moslems. Nothing was left to chance. So far as experience and engineering science could forecast the necessities of the future, provision was made for all eventualities—save only such a cataclysm as a world war, which threatened to interrupt the continuity of civilization.
As to the end and aim of the Bagdad Railway we are left in no doubt.