VIGERMANY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIREBRITISH POLICY AT CONSTANTINOPLE—THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CONCESSIONS—RUSSIA’S VETO AND THE CHANGE OF ROUTE—THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF ALEPPO—GERMANY AND ISLAM—THE BRITISH INDIAN FRONTIER IN SERBIA—THE GREAT WAR.Imustmake it plain that we are not here concerned with any aspect of Germany west of the Balkans. The scene of this narrative lies east of the Balkans and, insofar as it is possible to do so, we shall restrict it to its properlocale. Although there was no German tradition in Constantinople comparable to its British and French traditions, Germany’s highway to the East crossed at the Straits the favorite Russian route to the Mediterranean and hence afforded to the Ottoman Government the same protection from its Russian enemy as the British had once afforded. Nor was the German attraction solely diplomatic. The Bagdad railway scheme afforded the Empire an opportunity for that internal economic development which the Capitulations had made it impossible for the Government itself to finance.The British had not only supported the Government in Constantinople in order to bar Russia from the Straits, but incidentally in order to bar western Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines. But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy. Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to confine western Europe’s communication with India to the sea lines which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight facilities to India.But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the land lines toward India were at last uncovered. In 1888, the Ottoman Government transferred to a syndicate formed by theDeutsche Bankof Berlin a 56-mile railway from Haidar Pasha, a suburb of Constantinople, to Ismid on the Sea of Marmora, and accompanied the transfer with a concession to extend the line some 300 miles due eastviaEski-Shehr to Angora. In the acceptance of this transfer and the exploitation of the concession which accompanied it, Germany began to free itself of the Suez Canal.This concession was utilized by a German group calling itself the Ottoman Anatolia Railway Company, which soon received a further concession for the construction of a 230-mile extension of the Angora line to Caesarea. The new concession contemplated still further concessions through Sivas and Diarbekr to Mosul and thence down the Tigris to Bagdad, a route which would have cut Russia’s projected route from Kars to Alexandretta. Russia promptly vetoed it and the Caesarea concession was dropped. A second concession had been received at the same time, however, for a 269-mile line from Eski-Shehr on the Ismid-Angora line to Konia, and Russia’s veto now changed the Konia line from a feeder line to the main Bagdad line. The necessary concessions for its extension from Konia through the Taurus Mountains and on to Bagdad and Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf were granted in 1903 to the Imperial Bagdad Ottoman Railway Company, which took over the franchises of the original Ottoman Anatolia Company.With railways and railway concessions in its possession for a 1,800-mile line from Haidar Pasha to Basra, the Bagdad Railway Company now compared in its high political significance with the late East India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta. Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled. Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south, all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided, however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed, was only a two days’ march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a half-day’s steaming from Cyprus, which the British had taken secretly from the Sultan in 1876. Aleppo became the most vulnerable spot in the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme, protected in case of war only by the fact that prior Russian and French claims upon it might tie the British hands. Here the Bagdad Railway was to effect a junction with the French railways which drop down the Syrian corridor to Damascus, and the Caliph’s inland Hejaz Railway dropped from Damascus down the back of the Syrian corridor to Medina whence it overlooked Mecca. Had the British been free in case of war to occupy Aleppo from Cyprus, the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme would not only have been cut, but the Ottoman Empire would have fallen at once into two parts and ultimately into three. Deprived of the use of the sea, Constantinople would have been cut off from Syria and the Hejaz immediately and its communication with Mesopotamia would have been driven north into the heart of Asia Minor where the inevitable Russian advance from Trans-Caucasia would have imperilled it. Aleppo became the Achilles’ heel of the Empire, pointed out to all who know their maps by the tell-tale finger of Cyprus.When finally adopted, the route of the Bagdad Railway began at Konia on the Anatolian plateau, 3,300 feet above sea level, and well back into the hinterland approached the Taurus whose peaks rear their snow-clad summits against the sky at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Once through the Taurus, its route descended to the low plain of Cilicia and rose again to surmount the 5,000-foot Amanus Range which rims off the top of the Syrian corridor. Thence it dropped to the 1,200-foot level of Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was easy.Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of 1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system. It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more closely to the economic needs of the countries through which they pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic needs of native Governments.However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development of the East, and this is precisely what it didnotreceive. Germany backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German railhead, it would have cut the Government of India’s only line of communication with Teheran and would have menaced at Basra the Cairo-to-Calcutta line of its great Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme.The Bagdad Railway, however, did not expose itself to British diplomatic sabotage as France’s canal across the Egyptian isthmus had been exposed, for the British Embassy was no longer supreme at Constantinople. It was in Serbia that the German highway to the East crossed the Russian line to the Adriatic, and Austria-Hungary was still seeking a pretext to clear the remnant of the South Slavs from Germany’s path. In Serbia lay the frontier of British India. Over the Serbian criss-cross, Great Britain joined Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, France joined the two of them after the Agadir crisis of 1911 in Morocco, and Europe was divided into two armed camps, a division which pivotted on Serbia.Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911, Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia. By 1914, Great Britain had withdrawn its objection to the Bagdad Railway and had agreed to support no rival railway, exception being made for a Cairo-Basra line along the Cairo-Calcutta leg of its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle. At the same time, negotiations were nearing completion between France and Germany, but all these agreements lightly disappeared when the long-expected bugle call finally sounded out of Serbia on June 28, 1914, and away to the north, the east and the west, the drums began their answering roll.
BRITISH POLICY AT CONSTANTINOPLE—THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CONCESSIONS—RUSSIA’S VETO AND THE CHANGE OF ROUTE—THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF ALEPPO—GERMANY AND ISLAM—THE BRITISH INDIAN FRONTIER IN SERBIA—THE GREAT WAR.
Imustmake it plain that we are not here concerned with any aspect of Germany west of the Balkans. The scene of this narrative lies east of the Balkans and, insofar as it is possible to do so, we shall restrict it to its properlocale. Although there was no German tradition in Constantinople comparable to its British and French traditions, Germany’s highway to the East crossed at the Straits the favorite Russian route to the Mediterranean and hence afforded to the Ottoman Government the same protection from its Russian enemy as the British had once afforded. Nor was the German attraction solely diplomatic. The Bagdad railway scheme afforded the Empire an opportunity for that internal economic development which the Capitulations had made it impossible for the Government itself to finance.
The British had not only supported the Government in Constantinople in order to bar Russia from the Straits, but incidentally in order to bar western Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines. But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy. Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to confine western Europe’s communication with India to the sea lines which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight facilities to India.
But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the land lines toward India were at last uncovered. In 1888, the Ottoman Government transferred to a syndicate formed by theDeutsche Bankof Berlin a 56-mile railway from Haidar Pasha, a suburb of Constantinople, to Ismid on the Sea of Marmora, and accompanied the transfer with a concession to extend the line some 300 miles due eastviaEski-Shehr to Angora. In the acceptance of this transfer and the exploitation of the concession which accompanied it, Germany began to free itself of the Suez Canal.
This concession was utilized by a German group calling itself the Ottoman Anatolia Railway Company, which soon received a further concession for the construction of a 230-mile extension of the Angora line to Caesarea. The new concession contemplated still further concessions through Sivas and Diarbekr to Mosul and thence down the Tigris to Bagdad, a route which would have cut Russia’s projected route from Kars to Alexandretta. Russia promptly vetoed it and the Caesarea concession was dropped. A second concession had been received at the same time, however, for a 269-mile line from Eski-Shehr on the Ismid-Angora line to Konia, and Russia’s veto now changed the Konia line from a feeder line to the main Bagdad line. The necessary concessions for its extension from Konia through the Taurus Mountains and on to Bagdad and Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf were granted in 1903 to the Imperial Bagdad Ottoman Railway Company, which took over the franchises of the original Ottoman Anatolia Company.
With railways and railway concessions in its possession for a 1,800-mile line from Haidar Pasha to Basra, the Bagdad Railway Company now compared in its high political significance with the late East India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta. Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled. Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south, all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided, however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed, was only a two days’ march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a half-day’s steaming from Cyprus, which the British had taken secretly from the Sultan in 1876. Aleppo became the most vulnerable spot in the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme, protected in case of war only by the fact that prior Russian and French claims upon it might tie the British hands. Here the Bagdad Railway was to effect a junction with the French railways which drop down the Syrian corridor to Damascus, and the Caliph’s inland Hejaz Railway dropped from Damascus down the back of the Syrian corridor to Medina whence it overlooked Mecca. Had the British been free in case of war to occupy Aleppo from Cyprus, the Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme would not only have been cut, but the Ottoman Empire would have fallen at once into two parts and ultimately into three. Deprived of the use of the sea, Constantinople would have been cut off from Syria and the Hejaz immediately and its communication with Mesopotamia would have been driven north into the heart of Asia Minor where the inevitable Russian advance from Trans-Caucasia would have imperilled it. Aleppo became the Achilles’ heel of the Empire, pointed out to all who know their maps by the tell-tale finger of Cyprus.
When finally adopted, the route of the Bagdad Railway began at Konia on the Anatolian plateau, 3,300 feet above sea level, and well back into the hinterland approached the Taurus whose peaks rear their snow-clad summits against the sky at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Once through the Taurus, its route descended to the low plain of Cilicia and rose again to surmount the 5,000-foot Amanus Range which rims off the top of the Syrian corridor. Thence it dropped to the 1,200-foot level of Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was easy.
Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of 1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system. It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more closely to the economic needs of the countries through which they pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic needs of native Governments.
However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development of the East, and this is precisely what it didnotreceive. Germany backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.
As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German railhead, it would have cut the Government of India’s only line of communication with Teheran and would have menaced at Basra the Cairo-to-Calcutta line of its great Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme.
The Bagdad Railway, however, did not expose itself to British diplomatic sabotage as France’s canal across the Egyptian isthmus had been exposed, for the British Embassy was no longer supreme at Constantinople. It was in Serbia that the German highway to the East crossed the Russian line to the Adriatic, and Austria-Hungary was still seeking a pretext to clear the remnant of the South Slavs from Germany’s path. In Serbia lay the frontier of British India. Over the Serbian criss-cross, Great Britain joined Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, France joined the two of them after the Agadir crisis of 1911 in Morocco, and Europe was divided into two armed camps, a division which pivotted on Serbia.
Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911, Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia. By 1914, Great Britain had withdrawn its objection to the Bagdad Railway and had agreed to support no rival railway, exception being made for a Cairo-Basra line along the Cairo-Calcutta leg of its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle. At the same time, negotiations were nearing completion between France and Germany, but all these agreements lightly disappeared when the long-expected bugle call finally sounded out of Serbia on June 28, 1914, and away to the north, the east and the west, the drums began their answering roll.