There were some Germans who were not opposed to the Bagdad Railway enterprise, but who were opposed to the extravagant claims made for it by some of its friends and protagonists. A typical illustration of this is the following statement of Count zu Reventlow, shortly before the outbreak of the war: “Great Britain, Russia, and France, in order to interpose objections, made use of the expedient of identifying the _Deutsche Bank_ with the German Government. To this there was added the difficult and complicating factor that in Germany itself, in many quarters, the aim and the significance of the railway plan were proclaimed to the world, partly in an inaccurate and grossly exaggerated manner.... In this respect great mistakes were made among us, which it was in no way necessary to make. The more quietly the Railway could have been constructed the better.... That it would be possible to make Turkey a dangerous threat against Egypt and India, after the development of its railway system, was correct, to be sure, but it was imperative not to say anything of that kind as long as Great Britain still had means to hinder and prevent the construction of the railway.” Similar opinions were expressed from time to time on the floor of the Reichstag.[38] The Bagdad Railway, however, was a triumphant enterprise which would brook no opposition. In the army of its followers marched the stockholders and directors of the _Deutsche Bank_—such men as Edward B. von Speyer, Wolfgang Kapp, Karl von Siemens, Karl Helfferich, Arthur von Gwinner—good patriots all, with a financial stake in the Railway. Then there came the engineers and contractors who furnished the materials and constructed the line and who shared in the profits of its subsidiary enterprises—mines, oil wells, docks, wharves, irrigation works. Next came the shipping interests—the subsidized services of Herr Ballin and the Hamburg-American Line included—which were at once the feeders and the fed of the Railway. There were also the German traders who sought in the Near East a market for their products and the German manufacturers who looked to this newly opened territory for an uninterrupted supply of raw materials. In the line of march, too, were the missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, who sought to promote a renaissance of the Holy Land through the extension of German influence there. Bringing up the rear, although by no means the least important, were the soldiers and the diplomatic and consular officers, those “parasites” of modern imperialism who almost invariably will be found in cordial support of any movement for political and economic expansion. In the reviewing stand, cheering the marchers, were the great mass of average patriotic citizens who were thrilled with “their” Bagdad Railway and “their” _Drang nach Osten_. And the chief of the reviewers was His Imperial Majesty, William II.[39]