But French and English as well as Italian and Russian claims were ignored, their projects for connecting the Mediterranean with the Persian Gulf were rejected and the long and eagerly sought concession was awarded to a group of German capitalists, _alias_ the Deutsche Bank, _alias_, their opponents contend, the German Government. What the Germans call _Drang nach Osten_--Trend towards the East--dates from the time of Alexander the Great. It drove the legions of the Cæsars to the Euphrates and the Tigris and impelled the hosts of the Crusaders to seek glory on the desert wastes of Syria and Mesopotamia. It urged Napoleon to undertake his famous campaign in Egypt and was at the bottom of his alliance with the Czar Alexander I--an alliance that was to carry the combined armies of France and Russia to the heart of India. As to the Germans, they have never ceased “to dream of the _Morgenland_ since the epic of Barbarossa’s crusade and the legendary disappearance of that great figure of Teutonic battle and romance in the Cilician stream.” When von Moltke, 1835–1839, was assisting the Sultan Mahmud II to reorganize the Ottoman army on the German plan he was greatly impressed with the possibilities offered by Asia Minor as a field for German commerce and enterprise. Others of his countrymen thought it would be good policy to divert the current of German emigration from America to Asia Minor. And, although the Porte had always been opposed to all schemes of German colonization in Turkey, there was reason to believe that the Ottoman Government, after the completion of the Bagdad Railway, would consent to German colonists settling in certain places in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. For, several decades before the Germans had secured the concession to build the Bagdad Railroad, the friendliest relations had existed between Constantinople and Berlin. This was particularly true after the defeat of France in 1870, when Germany was reorganized as the first military power in the world. For thenceforward Turkey not only maintained a goodly number of military students in Germany, but also had many German officers in her army, among whom was the distinguished Field Marshal Goltz Pasha. It was, however, more than a half century before von Moltke’s idea of developing Anatolia and Mesopotamia was given practical consideration. It was then taken up by Dr. George von Siemens, the distinguished president of the Deutsche Bank, who, like so many of his countrymen, had come under the spell of Germany’s _Weltpolitik_ and, like them, had been caught in the current of the _Drang nach Osten_.