Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/151

 a source of great annoyance to Dr. von Gwinner, who was constantly called upon to explain irresponsible, provocative, and bombastic statements from Rohrbach's pen. It is well to recall that the writings of publicists are sometimes taken too seriously.[16]

It would have been foolhardy, nevertheless, to discard these possibilities as purely imaginary. Once the Bagdad Railway was constructed and its subsidiary enterprises developed, there would have existed the great temptation to utilize economic influence for the promotion of strategic and diplomatic purposes. In an era of intensive military and economic preparedness for war the observance of the niceties of international relationships is not always to be counted upon. In such circumstances the wishes of the business men—whether they were imperialistic or anti-imperialistic—may be over-ruled by the statesmen and the soldiers. The chance to strike telling blows at French prestige in the Levant; the opportunity to embarrass Russia by strengthening Turkey; the possibility of menacing the communications of the British Empire; the likelihood of recruiting Turkish military and economic strength in the cause of Germany,—these were alluring prospects for discomfiting the Entente rivals of the German Empire.

At the same time it should be mentioned that promotion of the Bagdad Railway would serve to weld firmer the Austro-German alliance. Austrian ambitions in the Near East centered in the Vienna-Salonica railway and were distinct from the Berlin-to-Bagdad plan of the Germans; nevertheless circumstances served to promote a community of interest. First, the routes of the railways through the Balkans coincided in part: the Austrian railway ran via Belgrade and Nish to Salonica; traffic "from Berlin to Bagdad" followed the same line to Nish, where it branched off to Sofia and Constantinople. Second,