Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was easy.
Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of 1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system. It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more closely to the
