Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/302

 belligerents to overlook its imperial possibilities. A war which was fought for the protection of France against German aggression, for the defence of Belgian neutrality, for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, for the democratizing of a bureaucratic German Empire—this war was fought not only in Flanders and Picardy and the Vosges, but in Africa and Asia and the South Seas; not only in Poland and Galicia and East Prussia, but in Mesopotamia and Syria and the Dardanelles. Anatolia, Palestine, and the region of the Persian Gulf were as much the stakes of the war as Italia irredenta, the lost provinces of France, or the Serbian "outlet" to the Adriatic.

Of all the spoils of the war, Turkey was among the richest. Her undeveloped wealth in minerals and fuel; her potentialities as a producer of foodstuffs, cotton, and other agricultural products; her possibilities as a market—these were alluring as war-time necessities and peace-time assets. Her strategic position was of inestimable importance to any nation which hoped to establish colonial power in the eastern Mediterranean. Her future as a sphere of influence promised unusual opportunities for the investment of capital and the acquisition of exclusive economic rights. It was no accident, therefore, that brought men from Berlin and Bombay, Stuttgart and Sydney, Munich and Marseilles, to fight bitterly for possession of the cliffs of Gallipoli, the deserts of Mesopotamia, and the coast of Syria. Turkey-in-Asia was a rich prize upon which imperialists in Berlin and Vienna, London and Paris and Petrograd, had set their hearts.

No sooner had Turkey entered the war than the imperial aspects of the struggle became apparent. Germany was deluged with literature designed to show that Ottoman participation in the war would assure Germany and Austria their legitimate "place in the sun." Business men and diplomatists, missionaries and Oriental scholars[6]