In the meantime, the English millionaire, Cecil Rhodes, had formed a plan for a railroad which should run the entire length of Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo. It was England’s ambition to control all the territory through which this road should run. But the French, too, were spreading out over Africa. Their expeditions through the Sahara Desert had joined their colonies of Algeria and Tunis to those on the west coast of Africa and others along the Gulf of Guinea. In this same year, 1898, while Lord Kitchener was still fighting the Arabs, a French expedition under Major Marchand struggled across the Sahara and reached the Nile at Fashoda, several miles above Khartoom. Marchand planted the French flag and announced that he took possession of this territory for the republic of France.
The English were very indignant when they heard of what Marchand had done. If France held Fashoda, their “Cape to Cairo” railroad was cut right in the middle, and they could advance their territory no farther up the valley of the Nile. They notified France that this was English land. Marchand retorted that no Englishman had ever set foot there, and that the French flag would never be hauled down after it had once been planted on the Nile. Excitement ran high. The French people had no love for England, and they encouraged Marchand to remain where he was. The English newspapers demanded that he be withdrawn. Germany, which had already begun its campaign to wrest from England the leading place on the ocean, was delighted at the prospect of a war between France and the British. The German diplomats patted France on the back, and practically assured her of German help in case it came to a war with England.
Germany now felt that she had nothing more to fear from France. The French population was not increasing, while Germany was steadily growing in numbers. It was England whom Germany saw across her path toward control of the sea.
There was a man in France, however, who had no thought of making up with Germany. The memory of the war of 1870 and of the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine was very strong with him. This was Théophile Delcassé, a little man with a large head and a great brain. He refused to be tempted by the offers of German help, thinking that England, with its free government, was a much better friend for the republic than the military empire of Germany could be.