LAND & WATER 
"Bagdad at Any Cost" 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
October iS, TQT7 
B 
AGDAD at any cost 1 " The endless iteration of 
that expression in the German press during the last 
kthree months has. been onlv one of a score of signs 
___^ 'indicating that the octopus of Middle Europe was 
as implacably resolved to extend its most easterly tentacle to 
its full length as it is not to relax the stranglehold which its 
most westerly one has thrown around Belgium. And , it 
should bv nomeans be assumed that the stinging rap which 
(ieneral iWaude has dealt to one of the Turkish feelers of 
this eastern arm at Ramadie is calculated to arrest more than 
temporarily the impulses which have been set going from the 
monster's Teutonic nerve-centre. 
With Falkenhavn directing in jierson the strategy' of the 
enemy in the Near Eastern theatre, there is every reason to 
believe that the campaign to regain Bagdad and re-establish the 
waning prestige of the Teuton cast of the Bosphorus will be 
vigorouslv prosecuted ; but even so, there is still more 
reason to"^ believe that not only will an adequate defence be 
maintained,. but that the chances for a further British advance 
—should such a move commend itself to those directing the 
campaign— are far from unfavourable. There has been no 
time since the recapture of Kut when British moral and 
organisation in this theatre have not been far above those of 
the enemv : but even assuming the opposing armies to be more 
or less balanced on this score, there are still two important 
factors which in themselves would be sufficient to create a 
situation increasinglv unfavourable to the enemy. These 
are transport and what one might call the local economic 
situation, neither of which appear to have been fully appre- 
ciated in England. I shall touch on each very briefly before 
going on to a discussion of what Mesopotamia means, or might 
mean, to the British Empire. 
Communications , ' 
From the inception of the Mesopotamian expedition, the 
British had. potentially at least, all the best of it on the score 
of communications, and the disaster to Townshend at Kut-el- 
Amara was due — more than to any other one thing — to the 
failure to take advantage of the opportunity to develop an 
adequate system of paddle-wheel steamer and barge transport 
on the navigable Tigris. With the river transport as at 
present carried on (with its auxiliary of light railways), it is 
not too much to say that the British are in better shape to 
maintain an army on a front in the latitude of Bagdad, 
and even up to and perhaps north of Samara, than the Turks 
would be if thev had a single-track railway all the way through 
from the Bosphorus. The fact that the 'Mesopotamian army 
must now draw a far greater amount of both its food and 
munitions from India than it did in its first year, must also 
make a great difference in the problem of sea transport. 
As to what the Germans have done to improve the Turkish 
transport we can only speculate. The Bagdad railway is 
usuallv shown on the strategic maps published in the Allied 
countries as coming to an end at Xisbin, about two-thirds-of 
the way across from Aleppo to Mosul, on the Tigris. If it 
is true, however, that the tunnels have been completed and 
rail connection established through the Taurus and Amanus 
mountains, there is no reason that material should not have 
come rapidly enough to carry the rail-head much farther east, 
and possibly all the way into the amph.itheatre of brown 
hills where Mosul looks across to the ruins of old Nineveh. 
Even this, however, would still leave the Turk at a great 
disadvantage, for he certainly has not the rafting material 
that would make it iwssible to float supplies to his armies 
down the shallow but swift-flowing Tigris. 
No probable development of the Bagdad Railway along its 
original route is likely to give the Turks communications com- 
parable to those already at the dispxjsal of the British, but the 
thing of which one would like to have assurance, is what 
he has done in improving the direct route from Aleppo to 
Bagdad down the Euphrates. The very sizeable force which 
fell a victim to General Maude's masterly strategy almost 
certainly came from this direction, and the fact that several 
disassernbled engines were among the booty might be taken 
to indicate that some sections at least of this route had been 
bridged by rail. While the chances are that the captured 
railway material was brought there for fiilure use on the light 
line which runs across from the Tigris to the Euphrates at 
this front (after it had been taken from the British, of course), 
it shoiild not be forgotten that the Euphrates route is not 
onlv the most direct one between Aleppo and Bagdad, but that 
it -is even freer than the other from heavy engineering work. 
Indeed, I have already mentioned in L.\>;d & W.Vter 
how Meissncr Pasha, who was then engaged in building the 
Bagdad Railwav, practically admitted to me in the spring of 
1912 that political rather than engineering or commercial 
considerations had been responsible for carrying the survey 
across the half-desert hills of Upper Mesopotamia _to Mosul. 
The idea was, he gave me to understand, to " flank " Armenia, 
and to make ultimately of Mosul a junction point from which 
dominating strategic fines would radiate to northern and 
central Persia. 
Down the Euphrates 
There is little doubt that if the Germans could have seen 
ahead to a two or three years' campaign in Mesopotamia 
when operations were first planned for this theatre, they would 
have left the railhead on the original survey of the Bagdad 
Railway just where it was — somewhere out towards Kas-el- 
Ain — and devoted all their energies and material to pushing 
a line down the Euphrates. There would have been some 
cutting and filling — though all in soft earth — to do. but it 
would have been possible to raft material down the river, 
construct and inaugurate traffic on the easy stretches, and 
then link these up as the slower work was finished. It is not 
impossible that something of the kind may have been 
attempted in the last year, although the chances — on account 
of the increasingly insistent demands of Europ>e- — are much 
against it. Anyway that one figures it, it seems certain the 
British will have all the best of the transport to the end. 
How much the British stood to profit — and the Turk to 
suffer- — when the latter was finally pushed out of the irrigated 
area roughly included in the triangle Bagdad-Kerbela-Kut 
I hgdre never seen made adequately clear in any of the reports 
of General Maude's advance up the Tigris. This area 
togeiher with some marsh and much land- and not under 
canal — takes in practically all of the irrigated and intensively 
cultivated area of Mesopotamia. All the rest of the cultiva- 
tion along both Tigris and Euphrates consists only of incon- 
siderable patches where water has been raised from the river 
by wheels. \\'hile the Turks were in undisturbed possession 
of this area, they had an unlimited supply of fodder for their 
horses, as well as of most of the foodstuft's consumed by theii 
army. There is no other area of cultivation sufficient for feed- 
ing an army nearer than Aleppo, and all Syria had been 
famine-stricken for a year in consequence of the taking of 
food for the armies. When the Turk was pushed north of 
Bagdad, however, he found himself compelled to establish 
his front in a region which was a complete desert away from 
the rivers, while even along their banks the patches of cultiva- 
tion were only sufficient to eke out the lives of the villagers 
who maintained them. For the supply of foodstuffs the pres- 
sure on the Turkish transport must have been increased many 
fold from the day he dug himself in across the low table-lancl 
above Samara. The soil of most of the region of Upper Meso- 
potamia is rich, but its pitifully small rainfall could only be 
made to nourish crops under the most scientific " dry-farming " 
methods, into the mysteries of which, it is scarcely necessary 
to add, the .\rab /rf/«/j/n^the only available cultivators — have 
not yet been initiated. If the Germans are still going to 
insist on the Turks maintaining a fighting force in Mesopo- 
tamia, they have either got to 'take Bagdad, and the region 
south of it down to Kut, or else bring the food for that army 
from the already depleted granary of .'\sia Minor. 
The British army, in entering the cultivated area of Mesopo- 
tamia after the fall of Kut, naturally reaped most of the 
advantages of which the Turk had been deprived on being 
driven out of it. Flour and most of its meats it doubtless 
still has to bring from India or Europe, but the saving of 
transport on fodder, vegetables and fruits must be \ery con- 
siderable. I have never heard that the Turks destroyed the 
great barrage at Hindia, on the Euphrates, before retieating, 
and with this and its canal system intact, the food production 
of this part of Mesopotamia can— \\itli the importation of 
coolie labour from India— easily be kept abreast of the 
demands any army of occupation, /no matter how large, can 
possibly make. 
At a time then when it appears assured that, barring unfore- 
seen disaster, the indefinite tenure of Bagdad— with all it 
stands for— seems only a matter of " carrying on," it may be 
apposite to consider what Mesopotamia means, or rather 
might mean, to the British Empire. For a good many cen- 
turies It has been the custom to refer' to the Tigro-Euphrates 
\ alley as the world's greatest " graveyard of Dead Empires" 
without giving a thought as to whether or not the restoration 
of the conditions which enabled Empires to flourish there 
