Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/322

 and the sending of Turkish reënforcements to the Caucasus would have been even more materially delayed than was in fact the case."[34] For Turkey, then, the war had come at a most inappropriate time. Had hostilities begun ten years later, after the completion of the Bagdad system, military operations in the Near East might have had an entirely different result. As it was, the Bagdad Railway—and the international complications arising from it—proved to be the ruination of the Ottoman Empire.

During 1919, the Allied Governments set about possessing themselves of the spoils which were theirs by virtue of the secret treaties and by right of conquest. In April, Italian troops occupied Adalia and rapidly extended their lines into the interior as far as Konia. In November, French armies replaced the British forces in Syria and Cilicia. Great Britain began the "pacification" of the tribesmen of Mesopotamia and Kurdistan. And in the meantime there was plentiful evidence that German rights in the Near East would be speedily liquidated in the interest of the victorious Powers. For example, on March 26, the Interallied Commission on Ports, Waterways, and Railways announced at Paris the adoption of "a new transportation agreement designed to secure a route to the Orient by railway without passing through the territories of the Central Empires." Accordingly, a fast train, the "Simplon-Orient Express," was to be run regularly from Calais to Constantinople via Paris, Lausanne, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Agram, and Vinkovce. Later this service was to be extended into Asiatic Turkey, over the lines of the Anatolian, Bagdad, and Syrian railways. To meet a changed situation one must provide new paths of imperial expansion, and the