Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/309

 statesmen at London were thinking not only of winning the war but of eliminating Germany from all future political and economic competition in the backward areas of the world. "Because of the great political and military advantages to be derived from the capture of Bagdad," and because the "uncertainty" of the situation at the Dardanelles made apparent "the great need of a striking success in the East," Austen Chamberlain, Secretary of State for India, telegraphed the Viceroy on October 23, 1915, that an immediate advance should be begun. Fearful of the consequences, but faithful to his trust, General Townshend began the hundred-mile march to Bagdad. Worn out, but heroic beyond words, his troops drove the Turkish forces back and, on November 22, occupied Ctesiphon, only eighteen miles from their goal. This, however, marked the high tide of Allied success in the Near East during 1915, for General Townshend was destined to reach Bagdad only as a prisoner of war.[16]

Allied military successes in Turkey were not looked upon with equanimity in Germany. There was a realization in Berlin, as well as London and Paris and Petrograd, that the stakes of the war were as much imperial as Continental. Nothing had as yet occurred which had lessened the importance of establishing an economically self-sufficient Middle European bloc of nations. In the event that the German oversea colonies could not be recovered, Asiatic Turkey—because of its favorable geographical position, its natural resources, and its potentialities as a market—would be almost indispensable in the German imperial scheme of things. As Paul Rohrbach wrote in Das grössere Deutschland in August, 1915,