But to reach this land of hope and commerce the route by sea was long, and exposed to naval attack throughout its length till the Dardanelles were reached. The overland route must, therefore, be kept open, and three points of difficulty intervened, even if the alliance with Austria-Hungary permanently held good. The overland route passed through Serbia (by the so-called “corridor”), and behind Serbia stood the jealous and watchful power of the Tsars; it passed through Bulgaria, which would have to be persuaded by solid arguments on which side her material interests lay; and it passed through Constantinople, ultimately destined to become the bridgehead of the Bagdad railway--the point from which trains might cross a Bosphorus suspension bridge without unloading. There the German enterprise came clashing up against Russia’s naval ambition and Russia’s rooted sentiment. There the Kaiser, imitating the well-known epigram of Charles v., might have said: “My cousin the Tsar and I desire the same object--namely, Constantinople.” There lay the explanation of Professor Mitrofanoff’s terrible sentence in the _Preussische Jahrbücher_ of June 1914: “Russians now see plainly that the road to Constantinople lies through Berlin.” The Serajevo murders on the 28th of the same month were but the occasion of the Great War. The corridor through Serbia, and the bridgehead of the Bosphorus, ranked among the ultimate causes. The appearance (Dec. 1913) of a German General, Liman von Sanders, in Constantinople shortly after the second Balkan War, if it did not make the Great War inevitable, drove the Turkish alliance in case of war inevitably to the German side. He succeeded to more than the position of General Colman von der Goltz, appointed to reorganise the Turkish army in 1882. Accompanied by a German staff, the Kaiser’s delegate began at once to act as a kind of Inspector-General of the Turkish forces, and when war broke out they fell naturally under his control or command. The Turkish Government appeared to hesitate nearly three months before definitely adopting a side. The uneasy Sultan, decrepit with forty years of palatial imprisonment under a brother who, upon those terms only, had borne his existence near the throne, still retained the Turk’s traditional respect for England and France. So did his Grand Vizier, Said Halim. So did a large number of his subjects, among whom tradition dies slowly. With tact and a reasonable expenditure of financial persuasion, the ancient sympathy might have been revived when all had given it over; and such a revival would have saved us millions of money and thousands of young and noble lives, beyond all calculation of value. [Sidenote: ENGLAND’S ATTITUDE TO TURKEY]