THE WAR AND THE BAGDAD RAILWAY

CHAPTER I

THE WAR IN THE EAST

I

History is being made to-day through the war in lands replete with historic associations, that have witnessed the rise and decay of many a civilization. The conflict raging in three continents and shared in by the fourth sees armies taking possession of the valley of the Nile, whose pyramids were built 5000 years ago. Passing over a route identical in part with that of the traditional Exodus, the march of the English troops toward Jerusalem suggests a repe­tition of the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Cross and Crescent once more lock arms at sites that have acquired a sacred significance in the traditions of three religions. Further East, Russian armies are following the route of the Ten Thousand^{1 1}Trebizond at the southeastern corner of the Black Sea, captured by the Russians in the early campaigns of the war, is the point where the Greeks on their retreat from Babylonia (401 B.C.) at last reached the seashore. on the eastern border of Asia Minor, and are moving in Persia along some of the old routes on which the hosts of Cyrus passed in their descent upon the Euphrates Valley, and which two centuries later witnessed the remarkable invasion of the old East by the young Lochinvar, come out of the West. The imagination is stirred by the exploits of English armies landing at the head of the Persian Gulf and moving along the Tigris across the mounds, which have in part yielded but in large part still cover the remains of the civilization that arose in the Euphrates Valley thousands of years ago and which, spreading northwards, became the rival of Egyptian achievements.

Can any romance be stranger than the streets of Bagdad, only sixty miles distant from the ruins of ancient Babylon, with memories of past glory reaching back to Harun al-Rashid, resounding to the steps of European soldiery, and Mosul, opposite which lies all that remains of Nineveh "the great city," once mistress of the world, at the mercy of a European power! What does it all mean? It is reported that on the top of the remains of one of the ancient towers that formed a feature of the temples of Babylonia a "wireless" station has been installed since the beginning of the war. This par­ticular tower is the one, curiously enough, which tradition associates with the famous Tower of Babel. Are we perhaps to see in the use to which this senti­nel of a hoary antiquity has been converted an omen of the conquest of the East by the aggressive West? Or is it a symbol of the resuscitation of the East through the infusion of the progressive spirit of the West? Are the dry bones scattered through the valley as in the vision of Ezekiel,^{2 2}Ezekiel, Chap. 37. once more to be knit together with sinews and to be covered with new flesh?

On the other hand, in Arabia the standard of re­volt has been unfurled. The cry has been raised to reclaim the land in which Mohammed preached his new religion in the early part of the seventh century of our era for the people to which Moham­med belonged. Are we to witness perhaps a re­vival of the spirit which once created mighty forces to spread the Koran with the help of the sword throughout the world? Up to the present, to be sure, the "revolt" in Arabia hardly merits so digni­fied a name. The accounts of it sound more like a score of opera bouffe than a serious performance, but the anomaly presented for many centuries of a religion so essentially a product of the Semitic mind and an expression more particularly of the Arabic spirit as Islam controlled by a power of non-Arabic origin cannot endure for all times. To have the Sheikh el-Islam, the "chief of the church," at Con­stantinople, merely because Constantinople became the centre of a Turkish Empire four centuries ago, and a purely nominal head at that under the sur­veillance of a Young Turk cabinet, suspected of infi­delity and acting at the dictation of German officials, is indeed ludicrous. But England in encouraging the demand of Arabia for the Arabs—for she is be­hind this revolt—may be stirring up a spirit which it will be hard for her to control, for the spirit of Islam is still the spirit of fanaticism that sees only the doings of Iblis in a world that does not acknowl­edge Mohammed as the apostle of Allah. "Die ich rief, die Geister, werd' ich nun nicht los," says Goethe. The Near East is still largely the Moham­medan See Snouck Hurgronje's vivid account "The Revolt in Arabia," with a foreword by Richard J. H. Gottheil (New York, 1917). East, capable of acting in accord if a great leader should arise, who will succeed in uniting the followers of Orthodox Sunna ("tradition") with the Shiites^{4 4}Islam, apart from numerous sects, is divided into two great divisions formed by those who follow the "sunna" or Orthodox tradition, as against those who set up the claim that All was the direct successor of Mohammed. The latter are known as "Shiites" ("partisans"). for a great common cause. Islam does not spell Progress. If reinforced, it may lead to a revival of a Near East that will once more be the antagonist of western culture, rather than a minor partner. The revival of the East is thus fraught with various possibilities that may take a turn for good or evil according to the throw of the dice on the table of fate. Or shall we accept the more comforting western belief that we can control the dice, and by wise counsels direct the course of events into the right channels? Which shall it be, the optimis­tic creed of the West, "Life and death, the blessing and the curse, have I placed before thee, choose thou life" (Deuteronomy 30, 19), or the fatal­ism of the disillusioned East, which declares that "Allah is the only knowing one"?

II

The key to the situation, however, lies not in Egypt nor in Arabia, neither in Palestine nor in Mesopotamia, but in the region of Asia Minor—along the great highway leading from Constantinople to Bagdad. That region has from the most ancient times determined the fate of the Near East. Its rôle in the distant past has ever been to threaten the existence of civilizations and powers that arose in the valley of the Nile and in the valley of the Euphrates, as in the intervening lands of Palestine and Arabia. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria ex­hausted their vitality in warding off the menace of the hordes that held the region. Hebrew Prophets announced the doom of the world through the com­ing of nations from the north—meaning Asia Minor. Cyrus and Alexander began their conquests of the old-time world by first securing a grasp on Asia Minor. With that in their hands, Babylonia, Pales­tine and Egypt fell easily into their lap. The Romans kept their grasp on the East as long as they held the routes through the mountain ridges of central Asia Minor. Islam failed in its world conquest because it could not hold this wild region in check, and the union of the Arabs broke up into rival caliphates. Decisive battles of the Crusades took place along these historic routes. A kingdom of Jerusalem was destined to failure from the start because it lay exposed to attacks from the North. The Turkish Empire was founded with the con­quest of Constantinople in 1453, because through that event the control of the highway leading to the Persian Gulf was established. As long as that empire was able to maintain the two poles of the electric wire stretching from Constantinople to Bagdad, her dominant position remained unchal­lenged; her definite decline begins with a break in the current.

The conquest of that highway by Ottoman Turks meant the final triumph of Crescent over Cross, for it erected a barrier, shutting off Christian Europe from access to the entire East. A new route to India had to be found, and so in 1492 Columbus, sail­ing from Spain with this end in view, discovered a new continent.

In our own days we are witnessing what prom­ised to be the reopening of the old historic highway—the bridge uniting Europe to Asia—to Western control, through the project of a great railway stretching along a distance of nearly 2000 miles from a point opposite Constantinople to Bagdad, and thence to Basra and to the Persian Gulf. That proj­ect, which was well under way at the time of the outbreak of the war, is thus marked through its his­torical background as one of the most momentous enterprises of our age—more momentous because of the issue involved than the opening up of the two other world highways, the Suez and Panama canals.

The creation of a railway from Constantinople to Bagdad under European control is at once a symptom of the dissolution of the Turkish Empire which has become a mere shadow of its former wide extension, and a significant token of the new in­vasion of the East by the spirit of Western enter­prise. Passing along a highway over which armies have marched forward and backward ever since the days of antiquity, the railway is also a link connecting the present with the remote past.

More than this a project, which, on the surface, would appear to be solely commercial, assumes a romantic aspect through the struggle that the rail­way aroused for the control of a region that marked the ambition of all the great empires of ancient and mediæval times. The rivalry between Ger­many, England, France and Russia, centering so largely during the past decade around the Bagdad Railway, is merely the renewal under changed conditions of a conflict that began thousands of years ago. The modern world fights for this region as the ancient world did, with the railroad as the new symbol of a possession stronger and firmer than the garrisons and outposts of antiquity and the for­tresses of the Roman and mediæval periods. The importance of Constantinople lies in its position as the starting-point of the great highway that has as its natural outlets the Bay of Alexandretta on the one hand, and the Persian Gulf on the other. The historical rôle of this highway gives to the Bagdad Railway a political import far transcending its aspect as one of the great commercial enterprises of our days. Backed as the project was by the German government, steadily growing in power and aggressiveness since the establishment of the united German Empire, it added to the already complicated Eastern Question an aggravating factor that con­tributed largely to the outbreak of the great war. The present struggle for supremacy among Euro­pean powers resolves itself in its ultimate analysis into a rivalry for the control of the East as an adjunct to commercial expansion. The "trend towards the East"^{5 5}"Drang nach Osten"—a favorite phrase among German political and economic publicists. did not originate with modern Germany. It began with Greece, was taken up by ancient Rome and has actuated every Western power with ambitions to extend its commerce and its sphere of influence—Spain, Holland, England and France, and in days nearer to us Russia and Ger­many, Austria and Italy. Through a curious com­bination of circumstances, superinduced by the grad­ual weakening of the once dominant Turkish Em­pire, the struggle has shaped itself into its present aspect for a control of the great highway that is the key to the East—the nearer and the farther East.

A survey of the history of Asia Minor, as a resultant of the geographical contour of the region, furnishes the illustration to the thesis that the most recent events are merely the repetition on a larger scale of such as took place thousands of years ago, and at frequent intervals since. The weapons have changed, new contestants have arisen to take the place of civilizations that after serving their day faded out of sight, but the issue has ever remained the same. We are confronted by that issue to-day—the control of the highway that leads to the East. Through the war archaeological investigations and his­torical researches have been removed from their academic isolation to furnish the explanation for the political import of the Bagdad Railway project. The study of the remote past, so energetically pur­sued by European and American scholars during the past decades, is brought into the foreground through the stirring events of our days to illumine the bearings of the historic highway of Asia Minor on the issues at stake in the present world conflict. The decisive battlefields for the triumph of democ­racy are in the West, but the decision for supremacy among European nations lies in the East. The Bagdad Railway is the most recent act in a drama the beginnings of which lie in the remote past.

To understand the Bagdad Railway project, therefore, we must turn to the rôle that Asia Minor has played in history. That history reveals to us why Asia Minor was ever, in the past, as she is to­day, the determining element in bringing about the alternate rise and decline of the East.