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 shores 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 passes 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 'scrap' it in his mind, as it will be probably
scrapped 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,