Crescent and Iron Cross Part 5

As throwing a sidelight on the German complicity in the Armenian ma.s.sacres, the following is of interest. It is known that when Metternich succeeded w.a.n.genheim as German Amba.s.sador in Constantinople, he brought with him a speech, written in Berlin, which, by the Kaiser's orders, he was to read when presenting his credentials to the Sultan.

This contained a sentence which implied that Germany had been unable to stop the Armenian ma.s.sacres. Talaat refused to allow the speech to be read, obviously because it threw the responsibility of the ma.s.sacres on to the Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was that they took place with the connivance and even at the instigation of the Germans.

Eventually a compromise was arrived at, and the speech _in toto_ was read privately, the part referring to the Armenian ma.s.sacre not being published.... It is a pity that Germany is always found out....

_Crescent and Iron Cross, Chapter VI_

'THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED'

Let us commit the crime of _lese-majeste_, and a.s.sume (though the Emperor Wilhelm II. has repeatedly announced the contrary) that Germany is not at the conclusion of the European War to find herself in possession of the world. She has prepared her plans in antic.i.p.ation of the auspicious event; in fact she has had a most interesting map of Europe produced which, except by its general shape, is scarcely recognisable. The printing of it, it is true, was a little premature, for it shows what Europe was to have been like in 1916, and the apportionments are not borne out by facts. But a.s.suming that there is some radical error about it all from her point of view, and a.s.suming that there will not be either a conclusive peace favourable to Prussian interests, or even an inconclusive peace, but one in which the Allies will be able to dictate and enforce their own terms, the magnitude of the problems that will await their decision may well appal the most ingenious of their statesmen. And of all those problems none, it is safe to prophesy, will be found more difficult of solution than that which will deal with the future of the corrupt and barbarous Government which has for centuries made h.e.l.l of the Ottoman Empire. We know more or less what will happen to Alsace and Lorraine, to Belgium, to the Trentino, because in those cases the claims of one or other of our Allies to demand a particular settlement are quite certain to be agreed to by those not so immediately and vitally concerned. But in the Balkans these problems will be more complicated because of conflicting interests, and most complicated of all will they be in Turkey. One thing, however, is certain, that there can be no going back to the conditions that existed there before the war.

Ever since the Osmanlis came out of remoter Asia into the Nearer East and into Europe, the government of their Empire has gone from bad to worse. In the early days, as we have seen, their policy was to absorb the strength of their subject peoples by incorporating the youth of them into the Turkish army, by giving them Turkish wives, and by converting them to Mohammedanism. Such was the foundation of the Empire and such its growth. But having absorbed their strength, the Sultan's Government neglected them until they milked them again. They were allowed to prosper if they could: all that was demanded of them was a toll of their strength. They were cattle, and for the right to graze on Turkish lands they paid back a pail of their milk of manhood. But an empire founded on such principles contains within it active and prolific seeds of decay, and, as we have seen, more stringent measures had to be resorted to in order to preserve the supremacy of the ruling people. Instead of absorbing their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new method of killing them, so that the Turks should still maintain their domination. And the policy set on foot by him was developed but a few years ago into a scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity has far surpa.s.sed the killings of Attila, of whom the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs of the deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, with the exception of such part of it as has escaped into Russian territory, has been exterminated, and similar measures have been planned and indeed begun, against the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Jews.

In consequence of this, in consequence also of the European War, the policy of the Balance of Power as regards Turkey has been at length abandoned. The Allies have definitely declared in their joint note to President Wilson their aims in the war, and for those they have pledged themselves to fight until final and complete victory wreathes their arms. Among these aims are:--

(1) The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks.

(2) The expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilisation.

For a century that most inharmonious of orchestras called the Concert of Europe has, owing to the exigencies of the Balance of Power, kept Turkey together, and in particular has maintained the centre of its government at Constantinople simply because the Balance of Power would be upset if anybody else held the key of the straits that separate Russia from the Mediterranean. England, above all others, was instrumental in preserving that precarious Balance, and England now must confess the utter failure of her policy there throughout a century. It is humiliating to acknowledge the complete collapse of that which for so many decades has been the keystone of our ruling with regard to our Eastern Empire, but the arch has collapsed; Germany pulled the keystone out, and all our efforts to exclude Russia from free access to the Mediterranean have only resulted in letting Germany in. To-day she holds Constantinople, and the bitter pill must be swallowed. The situation, as it stands at this moment, is infinitely worse than it could have been for a century back, if at any moment during those hundred years we had done what we always ought to have done, and declared that the anachronism of Turkey being in Europe was more intolerable than anything that could happen in consequence of her expulsion. But we have acknowledged that now. We have also acknowledged the even greater anachronism of Turkey being allowed to dispose of the destinies of any of those peoples who inhabit the territories of the Ottoman Empire, for the Allies, in their joint Note, have declared that the remedy of these two monstrous abuses forms an essential part of their aim in the war, which in costliness of life and of treasure has already far exceeded any cataclysm that could have come to Europe through its doing its clear and Christian duty with regard to Turkey during the preceding hundred years.

And among the benefits which eventually mankind will reap in the fields that have been sown by the blood of the slain will be the fact that the Confusion of Europe will have accomplished a task which the Concert of Europe was too craven of consequences to undertake; and Constantinople and the subject peoples of the Turks will have pa.s.sed from the yoke of that murderous tyranny for ever.

We will take these two avowed aims of the Allies in order, and first try to draw (though with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will be the confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we pluck the fruits of the great crusade against the barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is quite useless to attempt to keep the map as it was, and peg out claims within the Empire where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks and Armenians shall live in peace, for it is exactly that plan which has formed a century's failure. At the International Congress of Berlin, for instance, a solemn pact was entered into by Turkey for the reform of the Armenian vilayets. She carried out her promise by slaughtering every Armenian male, and outraging every Armenian woman who inhabited them.

The _soi-disant_ protectorate of Crete was not a whit more successful in securing for the Cretans a tolerable existence, and the Allies had to bring it to an end twenty years ago, and free them from the execrable yoke; while finally the repudiation by Turkey of the Capitulations, which provided some sort of guarantee for the safety of foreign peoples in Turkey, has shown us, if further proof was needed, the value of covenants with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impossible for Turkey to repeat such outrages: the soil where her alien peoples dwell must be hers no more, and any Turkish aggression on that soil must be, _ipso facto_, an act of war against the European Power under the protection of whom such a province is placed.

The difficulty of this part of the problem is not so great as might at first appear. We do not, when we come to look at it in detail, find such a conflict of interests as would seem to face us on a general view. Even the precarious Balance of Power was not upset by a quant.i.ty of similar adjustments made by the Concert of Europe during the last hundred years.

The Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a suzerainty over her, and finally abolishing that: they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern Rumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some strange lapse of humanity, they always regarded the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new moral geography began, and ma.s.sacre in Asia was comparatively venial as compared with ma.s.sacre in Europe. But now the Allies have said that there must be no more ma.s.sacres in Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure this, it will be necessary to sever from Turkey the lands where the alien peoples dwell, and form autonymous provinces under the protectorate of one or other of the allied nations. In most cases we shall find that there is a protecting Power more or less clearly indicated, whose sphere of interest is obviously concerned with one or other of these new and independent provinces.

The alien race which for the last thirty years has suffered the most atrociously from Turkish inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is fitting to begin our belated campaign of liberation with it. If the reader will turn to the map at the end of this book, he will see that the district marked Armenia lies at the north-west corner of the old Ottoman Empire, and extends across its frontiers into Russian Trans-Caucasia. That indicates the district which once was peopled by Armenians. To-day, owing to the various Armenian ma.s.sacres, the latest of which, described in another chapter, was by far the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and probably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian inhabitants. Such as survive, apart from the women whose lives were spared on their professing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, have escaped beyond the Russian frontier, and are believed to number about a quarter of a million. In the meantime their homes have partly been destroyed and partly occupied by mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who were largely instrumental in butchering them. Their lands have been appropriated haphazardly, by, any who laid hands on them.

Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The robber-tenants must be evicted, and the remnant of the Armenians repatriated. Without exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia from villages and districts near the frontier, else they could never have escaped from the pursuing Turks and Kurds. Naturally, this remnant of a people will not nearly suffice to fill their entire province, but in order to satisfy the claims of justice at all adequately, the whole district of Armenia, as Armenia was known before its people were exterminated, must be amputated by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Empire and placed, in an autonomous condition in a new protected province, which will include all the vilayets of Armenia.

There is no doubt about a prosperous future for Armenia if this is done, and to do less than this would be to fail signally as regards the solemn promise made by the Allies when they stated to President Wilson their aims in the war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty and industrious people, possessed of an inherent vitality which has withstood centuries of fiendish oppression. With facilities given them for their re-settlement, and with foreign protection to establish them, they will, beyond question, more than hold their own against the Kurds. As a nation they are, as we have seen, partly agricultural in their pursuits; but a considerable proportion of them (and these the more intelligent) are men of business, merchants, doctors, educationalists, and gravitate to towns. Constantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them again, where lately they numbered nearly as many as the entire remnant of their nation numbers now; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia in the New Turkey which we are attempting to sketch.

They will probably not care to settle in the towns and districts that will remain in the hands of their late oppressors and murderers.

In the work of their repatriation none will be more eager to help than the American missionaries, who, at the time of the last ma.s.sacre, as so often before, showed themselves so n.o.bly disregardant of all personal danger and risk in doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and who have explicitly declared their intention of resuming their work. With regard to the eviction of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be remembered that the Kurd is a trespa.s.ser on the plains and towns of Armenia, and properly belongs to the mountains from which he was encouraged to descend by the Turks for purposes of ma.s.sacre. Out of those towns and plains he must go, either into the mountains of Armenia from whence he came, or over the frontier of Armenia into the New Turkey presently to be defined. He must, in fact, be deported, though not in the manner of the deportations at which he himself so often a.s.sisted.

The Armenians who will thus be reinstated within the boundaries of their own territory, will be practically penniless and without any of the means or paraphernalia of life, and the necessary outlay on supplies for them, and the cost of their rehabilitation would naturally fall on the protecting Power. They will, however, be free from the taxes they have hitherto paid to the Turks, and it should not be difficult for them by means of taxes far less oppressive, to pay an adequate interest on the moneys expended on them. These would thus take the form of a very small loan, the whole of which could easily be repaid by the Armenians in the course of a generation or so. Once back on their own soil, and free from Turkish tyranny and the possibility of it, they are bound to prosper, even as they have prospered hitherto in spite of oppressions and ma.s.sacres up till the year 1915, when, as we have seen, the liberal and progressive Nationalists organised and executed the extermination from which so few escaped.

It is hardly necessary to point out who the protecting Power would be in the case of the repatriated Armenians, for none but Russia is either desirable or possible. With one side along the Russian frontier of Trans-Caucasia, the New Armenia necessarily falls into the sphere of Russian influence.

It has been suggested that not only Armenia proper, but part of Cilicia should also become a district of the repatriated Armenians, with an outlet to the sea. But while it is true that complete compensation would demand this, since Zeitun and other districts in Cilicia were almost pure Armenian settlements, I cannot think that such a restoration is desirable. For, in the first place, the extermination of the Zeitunlis (as carried out by Jemal the Great) was practically complete. All the men were slaughtered, and it does not seem likely that any of the women and girls who were deported reached the 'agricultural colony' of Deir-el-Zor in the Arabian desert. It is therefore difficult to see of whom the repatriation would consist. In the second place, the New Armenia will be for several generations to come of an area more than ample for all the Armenians who have survived the flight into Russia, and it obviously will give them the best chance of corporate prosperity, if the whole of them are repatriated in a compact body rather than that a portion of them should be formed into a mere patch severed from their countrymen by so large a distance. Another sphere of influence also will be operating near the borders of Cilicia, and to place the Armenians under two protecting Powers would have serious disadvantages. In addition they never were a sea-going people, and I cannot see what object would be served by giving them a coast-board. In any case, if a coast-board was found necessary, the most convenient would be the coast-board of the Black Sea, lying adjacent to their main territory.

If it seems clear that for New Armenia the proper protecting Power is Russia, it is no less clear that for the freed inhabitants of New Syria, Arabs and Greeks alike, the proper protecting Power is France.

Historically France's connection with Syria dates from the time of the Crusades in 1099; it has never been severed, and of late years the ties between the two countries have been both strengthened and multiplied.

The Treaties of Paris, of London, of San Stefano, and of Berlin have all recognised the affiliation; so, too, from an ecclesiastical standpoint, have the encyclicals of Leo XIII. in 1888 and 1898. Similarly, it was France who intervened in the Syrian ma.s.sacres of 1845, who landed troops for the protection of the Maronites in 1860, and established a protectorate of the Lebanon there a few years later, which lasted up till the outbreak of the European War. France was the largest holder, as she was also the constructor, of Syrian railways, and the harbour of Beirut, without doubt destined to be one of the most flourishing ports of the Eastern Mediterranean, was also a French enterprise. And perhaps more important than all these, as a link between Syria and France, has been the educational penetration which France has effected there. What the American missionaries did for Armenia, France has done for Syria, and according to a recent estimate, of the 65,000 children who attended European schools throughout Syria, not less than 40,000 attended French schools. When we consider that that proportion has been maintained for many years in Syria, it can be estimated how strong the intellectual bond between the Syrian and the French now is. The French language, similarly, is talked everywhere: it is as current as is modern Greek in ports of the Levant.

In virtue of such claims few, if any, would dispute the t.i.tle of France to be the protecting Power in the case of Syria. Here there will not be, as was the case with the Armenians, any work of repatriation to be done. Such devastation and depopulation as has been wrought by Jemal the Great, with hunger and disease to help him, was wrought on the spot, and, though it will take many years to heal the wounds inflicted by that barbaric plagiarist of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical sympathy of the French with the race they have so long tended, which will most speedily bring back health to the Syrians.

It will be with regard to the geographical limits of a French protectorate that most difficulty is likely to be experienced; there will also be points claiming careful solution, as will be seen later, with regard to railway control. Northwards and eastwards the natural delimitations seem clear enough: northwards French Syria would terminate with, and include, the province of Aleppo, eastwards the Syrian desert marks its practical limits, the technical limit being supplied by the course of the Euphrates. But southwards there is no such natural line of demarcation; the Arab occupation stretches right down till it reaches the Hedjaz, which already has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under the Shereef of Mecca, declared its independence. Inset into this long strip of territory lies Palestine.

Now to make one single French protectorate over this very considerable territory seems at first sight a large order, but the objections to any other course are many and insuperable. Should the line of French influence be drawn farther north than the Hedjaz, under what protection is the intervening territory to be left? At present it is Turkish, but inhabited by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the fulness of their declaration not to leave alien peoples under the 'murderous tyranny' of the Turks, Turkish it cannot remain. But both by geographical situation and by racial interest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, and there seems no answer to the question as to what sphere of influence it comes under if not under the French. Just as properly, if we take this view of the question, the Sinaitic Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to Egypt, the French protectorate being defined westwards at Akabah. That the Eastern side of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the same control as the Western has always been an anomaly, admitted even by the sternest opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the absence of any ca.n.a.l corresponding to that of Suez, and debouching into the Red Sea _via_ the Gulf of Akabah, the most advanced champion of French influence in the Near East would see no objection to this rectified frontier.

There is no question of compet.i.tion involved. The proposed change is but a rational rectification of the present status.

This scheme of delimitation leaves Palestine inset into the French protectorate of Syria, and it is difficult to see to whom the protectorate of Palestine should be properly a.s.signed except to France.

Italy has no expansive ambitions in that sector of the Mediterranean; England's national sphere of influence in this part.i.tion of the districts now occupied by alien peoples in the Ottoman Empire lies obviously elsewhere; and since the Jews, who settled in ever-increasing numbers in Palestine before the war, and will a.s.suredly continue to settle there again, come and will come as refugees from the Russian Pale, it would be clearly inadvisable to a.s.sign to Russia the protectorate of her own refugees. The only other alternative would be to create an independent Palestine for the Jews, and the reasons against that are overwhelming. It would be merely playing into the hands of Germany to make such an arrangement. For the last thirty years Germany has watched with personal and special interest this immigration of Jews into Palestine, seeing in it not so much a Jewish but a German expansion. Indeed, when, in the spring of this year, as we have noticed, a ma.s.sacre and deportation of Jews was planned and begun by Jemal, Germany so far reversed her usual att.i.tude towards ma.s.sacres in general, and her expressed determination never to interfere in Turkey's internal affairs, as to lodge a peremptory protest, and of course got the persecution instantly stopped. Her reason was that Pan-Turkish 'ideals'

(the equivalent for the ma.s.sacre of alien people) had no sort of meaning in Palestine. But the Pan-Germanic ideals had a great deal of meaning in Palestine, as Dr. Davis Treitsch _(Die Juden der Turkei)_ very clearly states. For 'as a result of the war,' he tells us, 'there will be an emigration of East-European Jews on an unprecedented scale ... the disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany (and) Germans will be only too glad to find a way out in the emigration of those Jews to Turkey, a solution extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all _three [sic]_ parties concerned. There are grounds for talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry.'

Now this is explicit enough; Germany clearly contemplated a protectorate over Palestine, and if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are left independent, there is nothing more certain than that, after the war, her penetration of Palestine will instantly begin. These colonists are, and will be, in want of funds for the development and increase of their cultivated territories, and when we consider the names of the prominent financiers in the Central Empires, Mendelssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid, Bleichroeder, Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in much doubt as to the quarter from which that financial a.s.sistance will be forthcoming, on extremely favourable terms. It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during the twenty or twenty-five years before the war, and strong as is the spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet number more than about 120,000, nor have they under crops more than ten per cent. of the cultivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but settlers, and their work is before them. If left without a protectorate they will not be without a protectorate long, but not such an one as the Allies desire. A protectorate there must be, and no reason is really of weight against that protectorate being French. Let that, then, extend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, and from Alexandretta to where the Hedjaz already prospers in its self-proclaimed independence. It will be completely severed from Turkey by tracts under protection of one or other of the Allied Powers, any expedition through which would be an act of war.

The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French protectorate: it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia. Just as no other Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India, and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost, by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen, England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has held, and to the rank it still might hold among the productive districts of the East, there is needed a huge capital for outlay, and a huge population of workers. Even Germany, in her nightmare of world-dominion, from which she shall be soon dragged screaming-awake, never formulated a scheme for the restoration of Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre-eminence, and never so much as contemplated it, except as an object that would be possible of realisation after the Empire of India had fallen over-ripe into her pelican mouth. Therein she was perfectly right--she usually is right in these dreams of empire in so far as they are empirical--for she seems dimly to have conjectured in these methodical visions, that India was the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. But nowhere can I find that she guessed it: I only guess that she guessed it.

This problem of capital outlay and of the necessary man-power for work and restoration applies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, which we may roughly define as the district stretching from Samara on the Tigris and Hit on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. Northern Mesopotamia, as Dr. Rohrbach points out in his _Bagdadbahn_, needs only the guarantee of security of life and property to induce the Kurds to descend from the hills and the Bedouin Arabs to settle down there; and by degrees, under a protectorate that insures them against ma.s.sacre and confiscation of property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread and something of the ancient prosperity return. The land is immensely fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life.

The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its future prosperity.

But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally different proposition. The land lies low between the rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility, yields under present conditions but a precarious livelihood to its spa.r.s.e population. For nine months of the year it is a desert, for three months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. Once, as we all know, it was the very heart of civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out the life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarcely existent, any more than it is existent in Southern or Upper Egypt; but in the days of Babylon the Great there were true rulers and men of wisdom over these desiccated regions, who saw that every drop of water in the river, that now pours senselessly through swamp and desert into the sea, was a grain of corn or a stalk of cotton. They dug ca.n.a.ls, they made reservoirs, and harnessed like some n.o.ble horse of the G.o.ds the torrents that now gallop unbridled through dreary deserts. The black land, the Sawad, was then the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen the might of Babylon, and for centuries later, while the ca.n.a.ls still regulated the water supply, it remained the granary of the world. More than a thousand years after Herodotus there were over 12,500,000 acres in cultivation, and the husbandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab invasion, which was bad enough, but colossally worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 'a fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein.'

But the potentiality for production of that great alluvial plain is not diminished; the Turks could not dispose of that by ma.s.sacre, as a means of weakening the strength of their subject peoples. It is still there, ready to respond to the spell of the waters of Tigris and Euphrates, which once, when handled and controlled, caused it to be the Garden of the Lord.

Not long before the present European War Sir William Willc.o.c.ks, under whose guidance the great modern irrigation works at a.s.souan were constructed, was appointed adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his report on the Irrigation of Mesopotamia was issued in 1911. He tells us that the whole of this delta of the Sawad is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. It would naturally be a gigantic scheme, and he takes as a basis to start on the question of the refertilisation of 4,000,000 acres. Into the details of it we need not go, but his conclusions, calculated on a thoroughly conservative basis, give the following results. He proposes to restore, of course with modern technical improvements, the old system of ca.n.a.ls, and, allowing for interest on loans, estimates the total expense at 26,000,000 (or the cost of the war for about three days). On this the annual value of the crops would pay 31 per cent. The figures need no enlargement in detail and no comment.

But now comes the difficulty: the construction of the irrigation works is easy, the profits are safe so long as the Tigris and 'the ancient river,' the river Euphrates, run their course. But all the irrigation works in the world will not raise a penny for the investor or a grain for the miller unless there are men to sow and gather the crops. A million are necessary: where are they to come from? And the answer is 'Egypt and India.'

This is precisely why the protectorate of Mesopotamia and its future must be in English hands, why no other country can undertake it with hope of success. Even the ingenious Dr. Rohrbach, whose _Bagdadbahn_ I have quoted before, is forced to acknowledge that there is no solution to the man-power problem except by the 'introduction of Mohammedans from other countries where the climatic conditions of Irak prevail.' It is true that he starts upon the a.s.sumption that Mesopotamia will remain Turkish (under a German protectorate, as we read between his lines), with which we must be permitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite correct. Even under German protection he realises that citizens of well-governed states will not flock by the million to put themselves under Turkish control, and he dismisses as inadequate the numbers of Syrians, Arabs, Armenians and Jews who can be transported to Mesopotamia from inside the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. Their numbers are even more inadequate since the Armenian ma.s.sacres permitted by Dr. Rohrbach's Fatherland, and even he cannot picture a million of his own countrymen forsaking the beer-gardens for summers in the Sawad. He does not positively state our answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned before, I think he guesses it. His prophetic gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let him state the glorious future, when India and Egypt shall become German, but that, I feel sure, is his vision: 'he sees it, but not now; he beholds it, but not nigh.'

But we can give the answer which he does not quite like to state, since for the English it is clearly more easily realisable. The native labour we can supply from Egypt and India, especially India, will furnish a million labourers, and, if we wished, two millions without difficulty.

But no Power except England can furnish it. And that, I submit, is the solution of the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well within the power of English enterprise to attain in the hands of such men as have already bridled the Nile, the water-hors.e.m.e.n of the world. And I cannot do better, in trying to convey the spirit in which this work of reclamation should be undertaken, than by quoting some very n.o.ble words from Sir William Willc.o.c.ks's report, in which he speaks of the desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked stewardship.

'The last voyage I made before coming to this country was up the Nile from Khartoum to the Equatorial lakes. In this most desperate and forbidding region I was filled with pride to think I belonged to a race whose sons, even in this inhospitable waste of waters, were struggling in the face of a thousand discouragements to introduce new forest trees and new agricultural products and ameliorate in some degree the conditions of life of the naked and miserable inhabitants. How should I have felt, if in traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day represent what was the richest and most famous tract in the world, I had thought that I was the scion of a race in whose hands G.o.d has placed, for hundreds of years, the destinies of this great country, and that my countrymen could give no better account of their stewardship than the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing between deserts to waste themselves in the sea for nine months of the year, and desolating everything in their way for the remaining three? No effort that Turkey can make can be too great to roll away the reproach of those parched and weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven.'

But the harvests of Mesopotamia, when gathered in, must needs be transported, and for that railways are necessary. Water transport would, of course, carry them easily down to the Persian Gulf, but the supply will be mainly, if not wholly, wanted westwards, and it must be conveyed to the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. Already, in preparation for world-conquest, Germany has proceeded far with her construction of the Bagdad Railway, which was intended, after her absorption of Turkey, to link up Berlin with her next Oriental objective, namely, India; the Taurus has been tunnelled, the Euphrates bridged, and but for a hiatus of a few miles the line is practically complete from Constantinople into Northern Mesopotamia. But its route was chosen for German strategic reasons, for the linking up of Berlin with Constantinople and Bagdad.

This, it may be permitted to say, does not form part of the schemes of the Allies: it is to snap rather than weld such links that they have taken the field. What we want in the matter of railway transport for the harvests of Mesopotamia, and generally for our Eastern communications, is not a line that pa.s.ses through Turkish and German soil, and terminates at Berlin, but one which, after the directest possible land-route, reaches the Mediterranean and terminates in suitable ports.

The reader therefore is requested to _unthink_ the present Bagdad Railway altogether, to 'sc.r.a.p' it in his mind, as it will be probably sc.r.a.pped on the map, since it is utterly useless for our purposes. For taking Aleppo as (roughly) the half-way house in the existent line, we find that the western half of it lies in Asia Minor, in territory which, as we shall see, will remain Turkish, while the eastern half of it makes a long detour instead of striking directly for Bagdad. After our experience with Turkey there is nothing less conceivable than that we should allow a single mile of our new Mesopotamia Railway to run through the territory of the Turks, for who knows that she might not (say when harvests are ripe and ready for delivery), on any arbitrary pretext, close or destroy the line, even as before now she has closed the Dardanelles? Besides, for our purposes, a line that goes to Constantinople (in whosoever hands Constantinople may be after the war) is out of the way and altogether unsuitable. Eastwards, again, from Aleppo the present Bagdad line is circuitous and indirect, admirably adapted to the German purposes for which it was constructed, but utterly unadapted to ours.

Let us then 'sc.r.a.p' the existent Bagdad route altogether, and consider not what the Germans want, but what we want, which, as has been already stated, is a direct land communication with suitable Mediterranean ports. Of those there are three obvious ones, Alexandretta, Tripoli, and Beirut, of which Beirut is a long way the first in importance and potentiality of increased importance. Two possible routes therefore would seem to suggest themselves, one running from Alexandretta to Aleppo, and thence following pretty closely the course of the Euphrates till it reaches. .h.i.t, and from there striking directly to Bagdad. Aleppo is already connected with Tripoli and El Mina (the actual port of Tripoli), and also with Beirut by branch lines making a junction at Homs, and thus all those ports will be brought together on one system.

But if the reader will glance at the map, he will see that by far the most direct communication with Bagdad would be to run the railway direct from there to Homs, thus making Homs rather than Aleppo the central junction of the system. From Homs lines would run northward to Aleppo, due west to Tripoli, and south-west to Beirut. Either of those routes, in any case, would be infinitely preferable to the long loop which the present Bagdad Railway traverses, as planned on German lines and for German requirements. The new railway will thus lie exclusively in territory under French and English protectorate, and will probably be their joint enterprise and property.

Prospectively then, as regards the fulfilment of the solemn pledge of the Allies to liberate subject peoples from the murderous tyranny of the Turks, we have discussed the future of Armenia, of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopotamia. All those are well defined districts, and the demarcation of their respective protectorates should not present great difficulties. But there remains, before we pa.s.s on to the problem of Constantinople, a further district less easily defined, largely inhabited by European peoples whose liberty in the future we are pledged to secure. This is the Mediterranean coastline to the south and west of Asia Minor, the towns of which have been so extensively peopled and made prosperous by Greeks and Italians. Similarly among those of our European Allies who are desirous and capable of Eastern expansion, there remains one, Italy, whose rights to partake in this Turkish part.i.tion we have not yet considered. In the shifting kaleidoscope of national war-politics, it seems at the moment of writing by no means impossible that Greece, having at length got rid of a treacherous and unstable Reuben of a monarch, may redeem her pledge to Serbia, in which case, no doubt, she too would state the terms of her desired and legitimate expansion. But these would more reasonably be concerned with the redistribution of the Balkan Peninsula, which does not come within the scope of this book, and we may prophesy without fear of invoking the Nemesis that so closely dogs the heels of seers, that Italy will legitimately claim (or perhaps has already claimed) the protectorate of this valuable littoral. Certain it is that, when peace returns, the large population of Greeks and Italians once resident (and soon again to be) on these coasts, must be given the liberty and security which they will never enjoy so long as they remain in Turkish hands, and the hands that have earned the right to be protecting Power are a.s.suredly Italian.

Along the south coast a line including the Taurus range would seem to suggest a natural frontier inland from Adana on the east to the south-west corner of Asia Minor, and from there a similar strip would pa.s.s up the coast as far as, and inclusive of, Smyrna. That at least Italy has every right to expect, and there seems no great fear that among the International Councils there will arise a dissentient voice.

The inland boundary on the west coast is the difficult section of this delimitation, and into the details of that it would be both rash and inexpedient to enter.

II