Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/312

 and the last of the British troops were withdrawn during the first week of January, 1916. On April 29, Townshend's famished garrison surrendered. Shortly thereafter the offensive of the Grand Duke Nicholas in Turkish Armenia was brought to a standstill. During July and August a second Ottoman attack was launched against the Suez Canal; and although it was unsuccessful, the expedition reminded the British that Egypt was by no means immune from danger. By the end of the year 1916 Turkey, with German assistance, had completely cleared her soil of enemy troops, except for a retreating Russian army in northern Anatolia and a defeated British expedition at the head of the Persian Gulf.[19]

As for Germany, she "was unopposed in her mastery of that whole vast region of southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia which goes by the name of the Near East She now enjoyed uninterrupted and unmenaced communication and commerce with Constantinople not only, but far away, over the great arteries of Asiatic Turkey [the Bagdad and Hedjaz railways], with Damascus, Jerusalem, and Mecca, and with Bagdad likewise If military exploits had been as conclusive as they had been spectacular, Germany would have won the Great War in 1916 and imposed a Pax Germanica upon the world With the adherence of Turkey and Bulgaria to the Teutonic Alliance, and the triumphs of those states, a Germanized Mittel-Europa could be said to stretch from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the Baltic to the Red Sea, from Lithuania and Ukrainia to Picardy and Champagne. It was the greatest achievement in empire-building on the continent of Europe since the days of Napoleon Bonaparte."[20]

If Germany had been alarmed during the summer of 1915 at the prospect that she might lose her preponderant position in Turkey, the world was now alarmed at the