Crescent and Iron Cross, page 99 by E.F. Benson
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penetrative power extends into every branch of industry and economics. In November 1916, a Munich expert was put in charge of the College of Forestry, and an economic society was started in Constantinople on German lines with German instructors. Inoculation against small-pox, typhoid, and cholera was made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have Germans as their acting Ministers. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase. Germany owns the Anatolian railway concession (originally British), with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession, with preferential rights over minerals; they have bought the Mersina-Adana Railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad Railway; they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba Railway, built with French capital. They have secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour concession, thereby controlling and handling all merchandise arriving at railhead from the interior of Asia Minor.[1] Already on the Bagdad Railway the big tunnels of Taurus and Amanus are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be complete. Meanwhile railway construction is pushed on in all directions under German control, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (August 1916) allocated a large sum of German paper money for the construction of ordinary roads, military roads, local government roads, all of which are new to Turkey, but which will be useful for the complete German occupation which is being swiftly consolidated. To stop the mouths of the people, all political clubs have been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior, for Prussia does not care for criticism. To supply German ammunition needs, lead and zinc have been taken from the roofs of mosques and door-handles from mosque-gates, and the iron railings along the Champs de Mars at