by E. F. Benson
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 massacres 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 title 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 canal 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 competition 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 assigned except to France. Italy has no expansive ambitions in that sector of the Mediterranean; England’s national sphere of influence in this partition 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 assuredly continue to settle there again, come and will come as refugees from the Russian Pale, it would be clearly inadvisable to assign 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 massacre and deportation of Jews was planned and begun by Jemal, Germany so far reversed her usual attitude towards massacres 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 massacre 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 Jüden der Türkei) 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 assistance 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 trac
ts 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 massacre 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 sparse 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 canals, they made reservoirs, and harnessed like some noble horse of the gods 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 canals 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 massacre, 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 Willcocks, under whose guidance the great modern irrigation works at Assouan 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 canals, 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 assumption 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 massacres 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-horsemen 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 noble words from Sir William Willcocks’s report, in which he speaks of the desolation that has come to this garden of fruitfulness through wicked stewardship.