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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



name among business men the world 

 over. 



Baku is well built in spots and is tre- 

 mendously wealthy ; but it lacks the dis- 

 tinction of a city that has grown grace- 

 fully. It savors of the nouveaux riches 

 and the boom town still, at a time when 

 it is already declining as an oil-produc- 

 tion center, with Grozny and Maikop ris- 

 ing to wrest its laurels from the oil port 

 on the Caspian. 



The political situation at Baku has al- 

 ways been delicately balanced, and in 

 1905, in February and September, it was 

 a scene of brutality and massacre, to 

 which was added the terrible spectacle of 

 the burning oil fields — a present-day pos- 

 sibility. Combining as it does the ancient 

 and the modern, the Oriental and the Oc- 

 cidental, the Moslem and the Christian, 

 the Turanian, the Armenian and the Slav, 

 with liberal mixtures of Kazan Tatars, 

 Lesghians, Georgians, and Persians, Baku 

 is the key to the political situation in 

 Transcaucasia. A strong hand is needed 

 to control the situation, and the British 

 are just the ones to supply the needed 

 morale. 



One can only appreciate the impor- 

 tance of the British landing, simultane- 

 ously with Allied successes on the west- 

 ern front, by understanding something of 

 the psychology of the peoples occupying 

 the region. 



Expediency rather than principle actu- 

 ates all of them with the exception of the 

 Armenians. And expediency urges some- 

 thing different with Allied victories in 

 France and a British force at Baku than 

 it did last March, when I was in Baku, 

 when the news of the great Allied defeat 



on the western front was being given 

 wide publicity by German agents, when 

 the British Military Mission was removed 

 from the train at Elizabetpol as they were 

 trying to leave Tiflis, and when English 

 officers in Baku were obeying the orders 

 of the Tatars not to wear their military 

 uniform. 



To no one did the news of the British 

 landing at Baku come with more surprise 

 than to me, because I left there in April, 

 and at that time German propaganda was 

 alarmingly potent throughout Transcau- 

 casia and north Persia. I was only one 

 of about fifty Americans and British who 

 were ordered to leave Tiflis March 23, 

 and who saw the fighting in Baku from 

 March 31 to April 2. But the whole out- 

 look then was extremely pessimistic. 



The very fact that even a small party 

 of British are there now is significant, 

 for had they come when I was there I 

 doubt whether they would have been al- 

 lowed to land. 



JOINING THE CZECHOSLOVAKS 



From Baku we chartered a steamer to 

 Astrakhan, and thus opened the Volga 

 season, and in Astrakhan I left my Amer- 

 ican and English friends and went on 

 into Russia alone, back over the route I 

 had traveled nine months before, until 

 I came to Samara and joined the Czecho- 

 slovak expeditionary force. 



Every one who knows those true pa- 

 triots respects them, and every American 

 who knew them loved them as brothers 

 in a world struggle to prevent Russia's 

 subject peoples from becoming slaves of 

 the Kaiser, as these varied races were 

 once slaves of the Tsar. 



WHAT THE WAR HA: 



By Judson 



IT IS well-nigh two years since Mr. 

 Sidney Brooks told in the National 

 Geographic Magazine "What Great 

 Britain Is Doing" in the war. His article 

 was an eloquent plea to Americans to 

 realize the part his country was playing 

 in civilization's crisis ; and there was need 

 for it. 



3 DONE FOR BRITAIN 



G. Welliver 



At that time I was in England. Amer- 

 ica's declaration of war was only a few 

 weeks ahead, but its imminence was not 

 generally realized either there or here. 

 Probably, save when the two countries 

 have been at war, and during some try- 

 ing months of our Civil War era, there 

 never has been a time when misunder- 



