It is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the secret treaties with the pronouncements of Allied statesmen regarding the origins and purposes of the Great War. Certainly they were no part of the American program for peace, which promised to “the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire a secure sovereignty”; which demanded “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined”; and which announced in no uncertain terms that “the day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by” as is also “the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world.”[29] Allied diplomacy was to have its way in the Near East, however, for the goddess of victory finally smiled upon the Allied armies and frowned upon both Turks and Germans. As 1916 had been a year of Turco-German triumphs at the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia, 1917 brought conspicuous Allied victories along the Tigris and in Syria, and 1918 saw the complete collapse of the Ottoman Empire. On February 24, 1917, General Sir Stanley Maude, in command of reënforced and rejuvenated British forces in Mesopotamia, captured Kut-el-Amara, retrieving the disaster which had befallen Townshend’s army a year before. Deprived of the services of Field Marshal von der Goltz, who died during the Caucasus campaign, the Turks retired in disorder, and on March 11 British troops entered Bagdad—the ancient city which had bulked so large in the German scheme of things in the Near East. Although the capture of Bagdad was not in itself of great strategic importance, its effect on morale in the belligerent countries was considerable. British imperialists were in possession of the ancient capital of the Arabian Caliphs, as well as the chief entrepôt of caravan trade in the Middle East; therefore their prestige with both Arabs and Turks was certain to rise. At home, pictures of British troops in the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights appealed to the imagination of the war-weary, as well as the optimistic, patriot. In the Central Powers, on the other hand, the loss of Bagdad created scepticism as to whether the German dream of “Hamburg to the Persian Gulf” was not now beyond realization. This scepticism became more confirmed when, on April 24, General Maude captured Samarra, northern railhead of the uncompleted Bagdad line in Mesopotamia.[30]