THE "BAGDADBAHN"
In the development of her _Weltpolitik_, the most formidable, the most
feasible, and the most successful conception of modern Germany has been
the economic penetration of Asiatic Turkey. She may have failed in
Africa and in China. But there can be no doubt about the successful
beginning, and the rich promise for the future, of German enterprises
in the Ottoman Empire.
The countries of sunshine have always exercised a peculiar fascination
over the German. His literature is filled with the Mediterranean and
with Islam. From his northern climate he has looked southward and
eastward back towards the cradle of his race, and in imagination has
lived over again the Crusades. As long as Italy was under Teutonic
political influence, the path to the Mediterranean was easy. United
Italy and United Germany were born at the same time. But while the
birth of Italy threatened to close eventually the trade route to the
Mediterranean to Germany, the necessity of a trade route to the south
became more vital than ever to the new German Confederation from the
sequences of the union.
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When her political consolidation was completed and her industrial era
commenced, Germany began to look around the world for a place to
expand. There were still three independent Mohammedan
nations--Morocco, Persia, and Turkey. In Morocco she found another
cause for conflict with France than Alsace-Lorraine. In Persia and
Turkey, she faced the bitter rivalry of Russia and Great Britain.
The rapid decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the fact that its
sovereign was Khalif of the Moslem world, led German statesmen to
believe that Constantinople was the best place in the world to centre
the efforts of their diplomacy in the development of the _Weltpolitik_.
Through allying herself with the Khalif, _Germany would find herself
able to strike eventually at the British occupation of India and Egypt,
and the French occupation of Algeria and Tunis, not only by joining the
interests of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Germanism, but also by winning a
place in Morocco opposite Gibraltar, a place in Asia Minor opposite
Egypt, and a place in Mesopotamia opposite India_.
The certainty of economic success helped to make the political effort
worth while, even if it came to nothing. For Asia Minor and
Mesopotamia are countries that have been among the most fertile and
prosperous in the whole world. They could be so again. The present
backward condition of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is due to the fact
that these countries have had no chance to live since they came under
Ottoman control, much less to develop their resources proportionately
to other nations. The {60} natives have been exploited by the Turkish
officials and by foreign holders of concessions. Frequently
concessions have been sought to stop, not to further, development. If
there have been climatic changes to account for lack of fertility in
Asia Minor, this is largely due to deforestation. Ibn Batutah, the
famous Moorish traveller of the first half of the fourteenth century,
and Shehabeddin of Damascus, his contemporary, have left glowing
accounts of the fertility and prosperity of regions of Asia Minor, now
hopelessly arid, as they existed on the eve of the foundation of the
Ottoman Empire. Not only have all the trees been cut down, but the
roots have been torn up for fuel! One frequently sees in the markets
of Anatolian towns the roots of trees for sale. The treatment of trees
is typical of everything else. The country has had no chance. In
Mesopotamia, the new irrigation schemes are not innovations of the
twentieth century, but the revival of methods of culture in vogue
thousands of years before Christ.
The Romans and Byzantines improved their inheritance. The Osmanlis
ruined it.
In addition to sunshine and romance, political advantages, and
prospects of making money, another influence has attracted the Germans
to the Ottoman Empire. There is a certain affinity between German and
Osmanli. The Germans have sympathy with the spirit of Islam, _as they
conceive it to be interpreted_ in the Turk. They admire the _yassak_
of the Turk, which is the counterpart of their _verboten_. The von
Moltke who later led Prussia to her great victories had at the
beginning of his career an intimate knowledge {61} of the Turkish army.
He admired intensely the blind and passive obedience of the Turk to
authority, his imperturbability under misfortune and his fortitude in
facing hardship and danger. "Theirs not to reason why: theirs but to
do and die" is a spirit which German and Turk understand, and show, far
better than Briton, with all due respect to Tennyson. A Briton may
obey, but he questions all the same, and after the crisis is over he
demands a reckoning. Authority, to the Anglo-Saxon, rests in the body
politic, of which each individual is an integral--and
ineffaceable--part.
The Turkish military and official cast is like that of the Germans in
three things: authority rests in superiors unaccountable to those whom
they command; the origin of authority is force upholding tradition; and
the sparing of human life and human suffering is a consideration that
must not be entertained when it is a question of advancing a political
or military end. I have seen both at work, and have seen the work of
both; so I have the right to make this statement. For all that, I have
German and Turkish friends, and deep affection for them, and deep
admiration for many traits of character of both nations. The trouble
is that the people of Germany and the people of Turkey allow their
official and military castes to do what their own instincts would not
permit them to do. The passivity of the Turk is natural: it is his
religion, his background, and his climate. The passivity of the German
is inexcusable. He will not exorcise the devil out of his own race.
It must be done for him.
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In 1888, a group of German financiers, backed by the Deutsche Bank,
which was to have so powerful a future in Turkey, asked for the
concession of a railway line from Ismidt to Angora. The construction
of this line was followed by concessions for extension from Angora to
Cæsarea and for a _branch_ from the Ismidt-Angora line going south-west
from Eski Sheir to Konia. The extension to Cæsarea was never made.
That was not the direction in which the Germans wanted to go. The Eski
Sheir-Konia spur became the main line. The Berlin-Bagdad-Bassorah "all
rail route" was born. The Germans began to dream of connecting the
Baltic with the Persian Gulf. The Balkan Peninsula was to revert to
Austria-Hungary, and Asia Minor and Mesopotamia to Germany. The south
Slavs and the populations of the Ottoman Empire would be dispossessed
(the philosopher Haeckel actually prophesied this in a speech in 1905
before the Geographical Society of Jena). Russia would be cut off from
the Mediterranean. This was the Pan-Germanist conception of the
_Bagdadbahn_.
From the moment the first railway concession was granted to Germans in
Asia Minor, which coincided with the year of his accession, Wilhelm II
has been heart and soul with the development of German interests in the
Ottoman Empire. His first move in foreign politics was to visit Sultan
Abdul Hamid in 1889, when he was throwing off the yoke of Bismarck.
This visit was the beginning of an intimate connection between
Wilhelmstrasse and the Sublime Porte which has never been
interrupted--excepting {63} for a very brief period at the beginning of
the First Balkan War. The friendship between the Sultan and the Kaiser
was not in the least disturbed by the Armenian massacres. The
hecatombs of Asia Minor passed without a protest. In fact, five days
after the great massacre of August, 1896, in Constantinople, where
Turkish soldiers shot down their fellow-citizens under the eyes of the
Sultan and of the foreign ambassadors, Wilhelm II sent to Abdul Hamid
for his birthday a family photograph of himself with the Empress and
his children.
In 1898, the Kaiser made his second voyage to Constantinople. This
voyage was followed by the concession extending the railway from Konia
to the Persian Gulf. It was the beginning of the _Bagdadbahn_ in the
official and narrower sense. After this visit of the Kaiser to Abdul
Hamid, the pilgrimage was continued to the Holy Land. At Baalbek,
there is a stone of typically German taste, set in the wall of the
great temple, to commemorate the visit of the man who dreamed he would
one day be master of the modern world. If this inscription seems a
sacrilege, what name have we for the large gap in the walls of
Jerusalem made for his triumphal entry to the Holy City? The great
Protestant German Church, whose corner-stone was laid by his father in
1869, was solemnly inaugurated by the Kaiser. As solemnly, he handed
over to Catholic Germans the title to land for a hospital and religious
establishment on the road to Bethlehem. Still solemnly, at a banquet
in his honour in Damascus, he turned to the Turkish Vali, and declared:
"Say to the three hundred million {64} Moslems of the world that I am
their friend." To prove his sincerity he went out to put a wreath upon
the tomb of Saladin.
Wilhelm II at Damascus is reminiscent of Napoleon at Cairo. Egypt and
Syria and Mesopotamia have always cast a spell over men who have
dreamed of world empires; and Islam, as a unifying force for conquest,
has appealed to the imagination of others before the present German
Kaiser. I have used the word "imagination" intentionally. There never
has been any solidarity in the religion of Mohammed; there is none now;
there never will be. The idea of community of aims and community of
interests is totally lacking in the Mohammedan mind. Solidarity is
built upon the foundation of sacrifice of self for others. It is a
virtue not taught in the Koran, nor ever developed by any Mohammedan
civilizations. The failure of all political organisms of Mohammedan
origin to endure and to become strong has been due to the fact that
Mohammedans have never felt the necessity of giving themselves for the
common weal. The virility of a nation is in the virile service of
those who love it. If there is no willingness to serve, no incentive
to love, how can a nation live and be strong?
The revelation of Germany's ambition by the granting of the concession
from Konia to the Persian Gulf, and the application of the German
financiers for a _firman_ constituting the Bagdad Railway Company, led
to international intrigues and negotiations for a share in the
construction of the line through Mesopotamia. It would be wearisome
and profitless {65} to follow the various phases of the Bagdad
question. Germany did not oppose international participation in the
concession. The expense of crossing the Taurus and the dubious
financial returns from the desert sections influenced the Germans to
welcome the financial support of others in an undertaking that they
would have found great difficulty in financing entirely by their own
capital. The _Bagdadbahn_ concession was granted in 1899: the _firman_
constituting the company followed in 1903.
Russia did not realize the danger of German influence at
Constantinople, and of the eventualities of the German "pacific
penetration" in Asia Minor. She adjusted the Macedonian question with
Emperor Franz Josef in order to have a free hand in Manchuria, and she
made no opposition to the German ambitions. She needed the friendly
neutrality of Germany in her approaching struggle with Japan. Once the
struggle was begun, Russia found herself actually dependent upon the
goodwill of Germany. It was not the time for Petrograd to fish in the
troubled waters of the Golden Horn.
The situation was different with Great Britain. The menace of the
German approach to the Persian Gulf was brought to the British Foreign
Office just long enough before the Boer crisis became acute for a
decision to be made. Germany had sent engineers along the proposed
route of her railway. She had neglected to send diplomatic agents!
The proposed--in fact the only feasible--terminus on the Persian Gulf
was at Koweit. Like the Sultan of Muscat, the Sheik of Koweit was
practically {66} independent of Turkey. While showing deference to the
Sultan as Khalif, Sheik Mobarek resisted every effort of the Vali of
Bassorah to exercise even the semblance of authority over his small
domain. In 1899, Colonel Meade, the British resident of the Persian
Gulf, signed with Mobarek a secret convention which assured to him
"special protection," _if he would make no cession of territory without
the knowledge and consent of the British Government_. The following
year, a German mission, headed by the Kaiser's Consul General at
Constantinople, arrived in Koweit to arrange the concession for the
terminus of the _Bagdadbahn_. They were too late. The door to the
Persian Gulf was shut in the face of Germany.
Wilhelm II set into motion the Sultan. The Sublime Porte suddenly
remembered that Koweit was Ottoman territory, and began to display
great interest in forcing the Sheik to recognize the fact. A Turkish
vessel appeared at Koweit in 1901. But British warships and British
bluejackets upheld the _independence_ of Koweit! Since the
Constitution of 1908, all the efforts of the Young Turks at Koweit have
been fruitless. Germany remains blocked.
British opposition to the German schemes was not limited to the
prevention of an outlet of the _Bagdadbahn_ at Koweit. In 1798, the
East India Company established a resident at Bagdad to spy upon and
endeavour to frustrate the influence of the French, just beginning to
penetrate towards India through the ambition of Napoleon to inherit the
empire of Alexander. Since that time, British interests have not
failed to be well looked after in Lower Mesopotamia. {67} After the
Lynch Brothers, in 1860, obtained the right of navigating on the
Euphrates, the development of their steamship lines gradually gave
Great Britain the bulk of the commerce of the whole region, in the
Persian as well as the Ottoman _hinterland_ of the Gulf. In 1895,
German commerce in the port of Bushir was non-existent, while British
commerce surpassed twelve million francs yearly. In 1905, the market
was shared about equally between Great Britain and Germany. In 1906,
the Hamburg-American Line established a service to Bassorah. British
merchants began to raise the cry that if the _Bagdadbahn_ appeared the
Germans would soon have not only the markets of Mesopotamia but also
that of Kermanshah. The Lynch Company declared that the _Bagdadbahn_
would ruin their river service, and their representations were listened
to at London, despite the absurdity of their contention. The Lynches
were negotiating with Berlin also. This mixture of politics and
commerce in Mesopotamia is a sordid story, which does not improve in
the telling.
The revolution of 1908 did not injure the German influence at
Constantinople as much as has been popularly supposed. The Germans
succeeded during the first troubled year in keeping in with both sides
through the genius of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, in spite of the
Bosnia-Herzegovina affair. Germany was fortunately out of the Cretan
and Macedonian muddles, in which her rivals were hopelessly entangled.
Mahmud Shevket pasha was always under German influence, and the Germans
had Enver bey, "hero of liberty," in training at Berlin. {68} German
influence at Constantinople succeeded also in withstanding the strain
of the Tripolitan War, although it grew increasingly embarrassing as
the months passed to be Turkey's best friend and at the same time the
ally of Italy! During the first disastrous period of the war of the
Balkan Allies against Turkey, it seemed for the time that the enemies
of Germany controlled the Sublime Porte. But the revolver of Enver bey
in the _coup d'état_ of January, 1913, brought once more the control of
Turkish affairs into hands friendly to Germany. They have remained
there ever since.
Germany strengthened her railway scheme, and her hold on the
territories through which it was to pass, by the accord with Russia at
Potsdam in 1910.
The last clever attack of British diplomacy on the _Bagdadbahn_ was
successfully met. In tracing the extension of the railway beyond
Adana, it was suggested to the Department of Public Works that the cost
of construction would be greatly reduced and the usefulness of the line
increased, if it passed by the Mediterranean littoral around the head
of the Gulf of Alexandretta. Then the control of the railway would
have been at the mercy of the British fleet. When the "revised" plans
went from the Ministry of Public Works to the Ministry of War, it was
not hard for the German agents to persuade the General Staff to restore
the original route inland across the Amanus, following the old plan
agreed upon in the time of Abdul Hamid. More than that, the Germans
secured concessions for a branch line from Aleppo to the Mediterranean
at Alexandretta, {69} and for the construction of a port at
Alexandretta. The _Bagdadbahn_ was to have a Mediterranean terminus at
a fortified port, and Germany was to have her naval base in the
north-east corner of the Mediterranean, eight hours from Cyprus and
thirty-six hours from the Suez Canal! This was the revenge for Koweit.
A month before the Servian ultimatum, Germany had contracted to grant a
loan to Bulgaria, one of the conditions of which was that Germany be
allowed to build a railway to the Ægean across the Rhodope Mountains to
Porto Laghos, and to construct a port there, six hours from the mouth
of the Dardanelles. There was a panic in Petrograd.
The events in Turkey since the opening of the war are too recent
history and as yet too little understood to dwell upon. But the
reception accorded to the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ at the Dardanelles,
their present[1] anomalous position in "closed waters" in defiance of
all treaties, the abolition of the foreign post-offices, the unilateral
decision to abrogate the capitulations--all these straws show in which
direction the wind is blowing on the Bosphorus. A successful
termination of the German campaign in France, which at this writing
seems most improbable (in spite of the fact that the Germans are at
Compiègne and their aëroplanes pay us daily visits), would certainly
draw Turkey into the war--and to her ruin.[2]
[1] October, 1914.
[2] This chapter was written before the sudden and astonishing acts of
war by Turkey in sinking a Russian ship and bombarding Russian Black
Sea ports on October 29, 1914.
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On the other hand, the German reliance upon embarrassing the French and
British in their Moslem colonies through posing as the defenders of
Islam and Islam's Khalif has not been well-founded. On the battlefield
of France, thousands of followers of Mohammed from Africa and Asia are
fighting loyally under the flags of the Allies. The Kaiser, for all
his dreams and hopes, has not succeeded in getting a single Mohammedan
to draw his sword for the combined causes of Pan-Germanism and
Pan-Islamism. Have the three hundred million Moslems forgotten the
declaration of Damascus?
In seeking for the causes of the present conflict, it is impossible to
neglect Germany in the Ottoman Empire. As one looks up at Pera from
the Bosphorus, the most imposing building on the hill is the German
Embassy. It dominates Constantinople. There has been woven the web
that has resulted in putting Germany in the place of Great Britain to
prevent the Russian advance to the Dardanelles, in putting Germany in
the place of Russia to threaten the British occupation of India and the
trade route to India, and in putting Germany in the place of Great
Britain as the stubborn opponent of the completion of the African
Empire of France. The most conspicuous thread of the web is the
_Bagdadbahn_. In the intrigues of Constantinople, we see develop the
political evolution of the past generation, and the series of events
that made inevitable the European war of 1914.
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