a line which, by the nature of the Turco-German understanding, must
primarily serve strategic ends[31], and the track was therefore
deflected to the south-east. This took it through the most barren parts
of Central Anatolia, and in the next section involved the slow and
costly work of tunnelling the Taurus and Amanus mountains.

"If merely economic and not political advantages were taken into
account," Dr. Rohrbach concedes, "the question might perhaps be raised
whether it would not be better to leave the Anatolian section alone
altogether and begin the Bagdad Railway from Seleucia" (on the Syrian
coast). "The future export trade in grain, wool, and cotton will in any
case do all it can to lengthen the cheap sea-passage and shorten
correspondingly the section on which it must pay railway freights. The
fact that the route connecting Bagdad with the Mediterranean coast in
the neighbourhood of Antioch is the oldest, greatest, and still most
promising trade-route of Western Asia is independent of all railway
projects."

It is worth remembering that a railway, following this route from the
Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, has more than once been projected by
the British Government. As early as the thirties of last century Colonel
Chesney was sent out to examine the ground, and in 1867 the proposal was
considered by a Committee of the House of Commons. For the economic
development of Western Asia it is clearly a better plan, but then Dr.
Rohrbach bases the "necessity for the East Anatolian section of the
Bagdad Railway" on wholly different grounds.

"The necessity," he declares, "consists in Turkey's military interests,
which obviously would be very poorly served" (by German railway
enterprise) "if troops could not be transported by train without a break