Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/313

 prospect that she might maintain that position. Nor was that alarm easily dispelled, for the Bagdad Railway and the power and prestige it gave Germany in the Near East were pointed to by statesmen as additional evidence of the manner in which the Kaiser and his cohorts had plotted in secret against the peace of an unsuspecting and unprepared world. In fact, the Bagdad Railway came to be considered one of the fundamental causes of the war, as well as one of the chief prizes for which the war was being fought. President Wilson, for example, in his Flag Day speech, June 14, 1917, stated the case in the following terms:[21]

"The rulers of Germany were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the thrones of Balkan states with German princes, putting German officers at the service of Turkey to drill her armies and make interest with her government, developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon Serbia were a mere single step in a plan which compassed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad

"The plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power and political control across the very centre of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous states of the East The dream had its heart at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else!

"And they have actually carried the greater part of that amazing plan into execution The so-called Central Powers are in fact but a single Power. Serbia is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a moment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will, and Roumania is overrun. The Turkish armies, which Germans trained, are serving Germany, certainly not themselves, and the guns of German warships lying in the harbor at Constantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day that they have no choice but to take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian Gulf the net is spread!"

As late as November 12, 1917, after some spectacular victories by the Allies in Mesopotamia and Syria, Presi