We must [writes Professor Diering] be true to ourselves by emphasizing and cultivating everything German. In all undertakings engineered by German diplomacy and financed with German money the official language must be German. Hence French, which has been the official language on Turkish Railways, must disappear. There must be a German school near every large railway station; and in these schools both the German and Turkish languages must be employed in giving instruction; any other language will be merely taught. Only specially selected and well-educated teachers should be sent to Turkey. Above all, German medical men must be introduced into Turkey’s railway system. They are the best medium for spreading German influence and for awakening esteem and affection for Germany.
On broad lines it is now quite clear what form the future Turkish Empire will assume. From Tripolis across to Persia and on to the ridges of the Caucasus, German energy—without injury to the sovereignty of the Osmanic State—will coöperate in Turkey’s renaissance and in the development of her treasures. But our enemies, together with their money, languages and schools will disappear from the territories which they hoped to divide among themselves.[175]
Equally explicit is another German writer, Herr Trampe, respecting the ulterior object of the Bagdad Railway.
The ancient highroad of the world [he declares] is the one which leads from Europe to India—the road used by Alexander—the highway which leads from the Danube via Constantinople to the valley of the Euphrates, and by northern Persia, Herat, and Kabul to the Ganges. Every yard of the Bagdad Railway which is laid brings the owner of the railway nearer to India. What Alexander performed and Napoleon undoubtedly planned can be achieved by a third treading in their footsteps. England views the Bagdad Railway as a very real and threatening danger to herself—and rightly so. She can never undo or annul its effects.[176]
The increasingly hostile attitude of the Entente Cordiale toward the Bagdad Railway, the violent ebullitions of the press of the rival powers portended trouble. No sooner had the concession for the building of the Bagdad Railway been officially announced than it began to weigh as a nightmare on a great part of Europe. The chancelleries of the Old World began then to realize more clearly than ever before the boundless possibilities of the great oriental highway. English statesmen saw in it the virtual doubling of the German fleet at the head of the Persian Gulf, and then the cry was heard throughout Britain, “Let us have the Russians at Constantinople rather than a great power on the Persian Gulf.”
The Bagdad Railway [declares an English writer] was a damnosa hæreditas, which was due as much to a lack of imagination and effective organization on the part of our business community in the eighties and nineties of the last century, as it undoubtedly was to a mistaken policy in those critical years on the part of the British Government.[177]
Small wonder, then, is it that the Bagdad Railway was from the very beginning of the great World War considered as one of the chief contributing causes of the terrific cataclysm of the second decade of the twentieth century and that, whatever political, economic, and social adjustments may be entailed as a result of the most stupendous struggle of history, it is destined to modify even more profoundly the relations between the Orient and the Occident than did the far-reaching campaigns of Alexander the Great, which introduced Greek people and Greek culture to the East and made known to the West the riches and the wonders of Persia and India and Babylonia.
CHAPTER VIII
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE CRUSADERS
Nations melt
From power’s high pinnacle, when they have felt