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Village near Aleppo with conical huts.THE BERLIN TO BAGDAD LINEIN THE PATHS OF CYRUS'S "TEN THOUSAND,"ST. PAUL, AND THE CRUSADERSBY JOHN H. FINLEYRed Cross Commissioner to PalestineILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHORWHEN Virgil in his FirstEclogue made Tityrus,reclining in plenteous prosperitybeneath his beechwood-tree,remark to Melibceus(who had been drivenlike a Belgian by war into exile) that certainimpossible things—such as the grazingof stags in the skies—would come topass before he would forget the face of hispatron who had kept him out of war's disasters,he included among these impossibilitiesthe reaching of the river Tigris bythe Germans. That poetical illustrationof the inconceivable came near in the year1918 to discrediting Virgil's profession ofallegiance to the dust of his patron CaesarAugustus. How near, one may discoverwho travels in 1919 by the "BagdadRoad" out beyond the Euphrates towardancient Nineveh; for this road, since thebeginning of the war, had burrowed its68way through the Taurus Mountains,crept farther along the edge of the Syriandesert, and awaited only a favoring lullin the Western battle or a Teuton victoryto leap to that farthest of the four riversinto which the stream divided that ranthrough the Garden of Eden.As it is, Virgil's figure of speech, usedtwo thousand years ago, is as happilypertinent to-day for illustrating an impossibilityof forgetting as ever it was inthe time of Caesar Augustus.I first saw this iron path (of one whoaspired to be William the Great) at Aleppo,the ancient Berea, the place wherethe empire-paths of Cyrus the Great andAlexander the Great crossed each other,though a half century apart. It was there,said Xenophon in that immortal textbook(which an infinitesimal per cent ofthe boys and girls now read in high school—Xenophon's Anabasis), that Cyrus's