The World War and What was Behind It Part 18

The sh.o.r.es and islands of the Aegean Sea should belong to Greece.

Greek people have inhabited them for thousands of years. The Albanians are a separate people, while Montenegro and Bosnia should be joined to Serbia.

Turn back to previous maps of Europe in this volume and you will see that most of the changes that have been made of late years are bringing boundaries nearer where they should be. You will also note that wherever there have been recent changes contrary to this plan, they have always resulted in more bloodshed. The part.i.tion of Poland, the annexation of Schleswig, Alsace, and Lorraine to Germany, the division of Bulgarian Macedonia between Serbia and Greece, and the seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria are good examples.

Questions for Review

1. What countries of Europe have fairly well-marked natural boundaries?

2. Who are the Walloons?

3. Who are the Romansh people?

4. To what other people are the Esthonians related?

[Ill.u.s.tration: The price of the war]

CHAPTER XXV

The Cost of It All

What war debts mean--The devastation of farms and villages--Diseases which travel with war--The men picked to die first--The survivors and their children--The effect on France of Napoleon's wars--What Hannibal did to Rome--What happened to the Franks--Sweden before and after the wars of Charles XII--Europe at the close of the Great War

In the meanwhile, all the countries in the war were rapidly rushing toward bankruptcy. England spent $30,000,000 a day; France, Germany, and Austria nearly as much apiece. Thus in the course of a year, a debt of $300 was piled upon every man, woman, and child in the British kingdom. The average family consists of five persons, so that this means a debt of $1500 per family for each year that the war lasted.

The income of the average family in Great Britain is less than $500 in a year, and the amount of money that they can save out of this sum is very small. Yet the British people are obliged to add this tremendous debt to the already very large amount that they owe, and will have to go on paying interest on it for hundreds of years.

In the same fashion, debts piled up for the peoples of France, Germany, Austria, Russia and all the countries in the war. In spite of what we have said above of the average income of English families, Great Britain is rich when compared with Austria and Russia. What is more, Great Britain is practically unscarred, while on the continent great tracts of land which used to be well cultivated farms have been laid waste with reckless abandon. East Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, part of Hungary, Alsace, Serbia, Bosnia, northern France, south-western Austria-Hungary, and all of Belgium and Roumania, a territory amounting to one-fifth of the whole of Europe, were scarred and burned and devastated.

It will be years and years before these countries recover from the effects of war's invasion. For every man killed on the field of battle, it is estimated that two people die among the noncombatants.

Children whose fathers are at the front, frail women trying to do the work of men, aged inhabitants of destroyed villages die by the thousands from want of food and shelter.

In the trail of war come other evils. People do not have time to look after their health or even to keep clean. As a result, diseases like the plagues of olden times, which civilization thought it had killed, come to life again and destroy whole cities. The dreadful typhus fever killed off one-fifth of the population of Serbia during the winter of 1914. Cholera raged among the Austrian troops in the fall of the same year. For every soldier who is killed on the field of battle, three others die from disease or wounds or lack of proper care.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rendered Homeless by War]

In time of war, the first men picked are the very flower of the country, the strong, the athletic, the brave, the very sort of men who ought to be carefully saved as the fathers of the people to come. As these are killed or disabled, governments draw on the older men who are still vigorous and hardy. Then finally they call out the unfit, the sickly, the weak, the aged, and the young boys. As a general rule, the members of this last cla.s.s make up the bulk of the men who survive the war. They, instead of the strong and healthy, become the fathers of the next generation of children.

In the days of the Roman republic, 220 years B.C., there stood on the coast of North Africa a city named Carthage, which, like Rome, owned lands far and near. Carthage would have been satisfied to "live and let live," but Rome would not have it so. As a result, the two cities engaged in three terrible wars which ended in the destruction of Carthage. But before Carthage was finally blotted off the map, her great general, Hannibal, dealt Rome a blow which brought her to her knees, and came very near destroying her completely. Five Roman armies, averaging 30,000 men apiece, he trapped and slaughtered. The death of these 150,000 men was a loss from which Rome never recovered.

From this time on, her citizens were made of poorer stuff, and the old Roman courage and Roman honor and Roman free government began to decline.

The Germanic tribes (the Goths, Franks, Lombards, etc.) who swarmed into the Roman Empire about the year 400 A.D., although they were barbarians, nevertheless had many excellent qualities. They were brave, hardy men and stood for freedom from tyrants. However, they fought so many wars that they were gradually killed off. Take the Franks, for example; the three grandsons of Charlemagne, who had divided up his great empire, fought a disastrous war with one another, which ended in a great battle that almost wiped out the Frankish nation. This happened about 840 A.D.

Sweden was once one of the great powers of Europe. However, about 1700 A.D., she had a king named Charles XII, who tried to conquer Russia and Poland. He was finally defeated at a little town in the southern part of Russia nearly a thousand miles away from home, and his great army was wiped out. After his time, Sweden sank to the level of a second cla.s.s nation. The bodies of her best men had been strewn on battlefields reaching from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Black Sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charles XII of Sweden]

For eighty years after the time of Napoleon, the French nation showed a lower birth rate and produced smaller and weaker men than it had one hundred years previously. The reason for this is easily found. During the twenty-three years of terrible fighting which followed the execution of the king, France left her finest young men dead all over the face of Europe. They died by the thousands in Spain, in Italy, in Austria, in Germany, and above all, amidst the snows and ice of Russia. Only within the last twenty years have the French, through their new interest in out-of-door sports and athletics, begun once more to build up a hardy, vigorous race of young men. And now came this terrible war to set France back where she was one hundred years ago.

Picture Europe at the close of this great war; the flower of her young manhood gone; the survivors laden with debts which will keep them in poverty for years to come; trade and agriculture at a standstill; but worst of all, the feeling of friendship between nations, of world brotherhood, postponed one hundred years. Hatred of nation for nation is stronger than ever.

Questions for Review

1. How does a nation at war increase its debts?

2. Why do diseases thrive in war time?

3. What became of the Goths and Franks?

4. Why was the reign of Charles XII disastrous to Sweden?

5. What was the effect of Napoleon's many wars upon the strength of the French nation?

6. Is war growing more humane?

CHAPTER XXVI

What Germany Must Learn

The German plot.--What the Czar's prohibition order did.--Where Germany miscalculated.--Where England and America failed to understand.--An appeal to force must be answered by force.--Effect of the Russian revolution.--"It never must happen again."--The league to enforce peace.--The final lesson.

Before 1914 friends of peace in all countries, but especially in English speaking lands, had hoped that there would never again be a real war between civilized nations.

Among the people of the United States and Great Britain it was unbelievable that any group of responsible rulers would deliberately plot, in the twentieth century, the enslaving of the world through military force, as we now know that the war lords of Prussia and Austria planned it. However, the plot was not only made but was almost successful. They made, though, a great mistake in the case of England.

They were sure that she would not enter the war. Her turn was to come later on, after France and Russia had been crushed. The German leaders were also mistaken in calculating the time that Russia would take to mobilize her troops. In 1904, at the outbreak of the war against j.a.pan, the Russian soldiers had become so drunk that it was many weeks before they could be gotten into any kind of military shape. But at the outbreak of the great "world-war" the order of the Czar which stopped the sale of strong drink changed all of Prussia's plans.

Instead of taking two or three months to a.s.semble her army, Russia had her troops marching in a mighty force through the German province of East Prussia three weeks after the war had opened. The result was that the German soldiers had to be sent back from northern France to stop the victorious march of the Slavs. The battle of the Marne, fought in the first week of September, 1914, decided the fate of the world. It hung in the balance long enough to prove that a small addition to the forces on either side might have made all the difference in the world in the final outcome. The little British army, which was less than one-eighth of the force of the Allied side, probably furnished the factor that defeated the Germans. The presence in the battle of the German troops who had been withdrawn to stop the Russians, might have given victory to the invaders.

Germany made a mistake, also, in expecting Italy to join in the attack on France. Any one of these three factors might have won the war in short order for the forces of Austria and Germany. With France crushed, as she might have been, in spite of her heroic resistance, without the help of the tiny British army, or with the intervention of Italy on the side of her former allies, it would have been no difficult task for the combined forces of Germany and Austria to pound the vast Russian armies into confusion, collect a big indemnity from both France and Russia, and be back home, as the Kaiser had promised, before the leaves fell from the trees.

As has been said, the great majority of the citizens in nations where the people rule, could not believe that in this day and age the rulers of any civilized country would deliberately plot robbery and piracy on so grand a scale. They had looked forward to the time when all nations might disarm and live in peace with their neighbors. In France alone, of all the western nations, was there any clear idea of the Prussian plan. France, having learned the temper of the Prussian war lords in 1870, France, burdened by a national debt heaped high by the big indemnity collected by the Germans in '71, looked in apprehension to the east and leaped to arms at the first rattling of the Prussian saber.

Germany, up to 1866 renowned chiefly for her poets, musicians, and thinkers, had since been fed for nearly fifty years upon the doctrine that military force is the only power in the world worth considering.

Some of the German people still cling to the high ideals of their ancestors, but the majority had drunk deeply of the wine of conquest and were intoxicated with the idea that Germany's mission in life was to conquer all the other nations of the world and rule them for their own good by German thoroughness and by German efficiency. It may take many years to stamp this feeling out of the German nation. As they have worshipped force and appealed to force as the settler of all questions, so they will listen to reason only after they have been thoroughly crushed by a superior force. The sufferings brought upon the German nation by the war have had a great effect in making them doubt whether, after all, force is a good thing. As long as the people could be kept enthusiastic through stories of wonderful victories over the Russians, the Serbians, and then the Roumanians, they were contented to endure all manner of hardships.

Someone has said that no people are happier than those living in a despotism, if the right kind of man is the despot. So the German people, although they were governed strictly by the military rule, nevertheless, were contented as long as they were prosperous and victorious in war. With the rumors and fears of defeat, however, they began to doubt their government. There are indications that sweeping reforms in the election of representatives in the Reichstag and in the power of that body itself will take place before long.

The Russian revolution was in some respects a blow to the central powers. In the first place the fact that Russia had a despot for a ruler while England, France, and Italy were countries where the people elected their law makers, made it impossible that there should be the best of understanding between the allies. Then, again, the various peoples of Austria-Hungary, while they were not happy under the rule of the Hapsburg family, were afraid lest, if they became subjects of the Czar, it would be "jumping from the frying pan into the fire."

They would rather bear the evils of the Austrian rule than risk what the Czar and the grand dukes might do to them. Turkey, likewise, was bound to stick to Germany to the end, because of her fear that Russia would seize Constantinople. When the new government of Russia, then, announced that they did not desire to annex by force any territory, but only wished to free the peoples who were in bondage, it removed the fear of the Turks as far as their capital city was concerned; it showed the Poles, Ruthenians, and Czechs of Austria that they were in no danger of being swallowed up in the Russian empire, but that, on the other hand, the Russians wanted them to be free, like themselves; it showed the German people how easily a whole nation, when united, could get rid of its rulers, and encouraged the bold spirits who had never favored the military rule.

The nations of the Entente, including the United States, are now united in an effort to stamp out the curse of feudalism in Austria and in Germany--a curse which has disappeared from all other parts of the civilized world. They are united to crush the military spirit of conquest which exists among the war leaders of the Prussians. They are pledged "to make the world safe for democracy" as President Wilson has said; to do away with the rule of force. So long as the governments of Germany, Austria, and Turkey place the military power at all times above the civil power, so long will it be necessary to police the world. There must be no repet.i.tion of the savage attack of August, 1914. There was a time when many of us believed that some one nation, by disbanding its army and refusing to build warships, might set an example of disarming which all the world would finally follow. It now is plain that there must be a "League to Enforce Peace" as Ex-President Taft and other American statesmen have declared. The United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Serbia, Greece, together with Spain, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other nations where the will of the people is the law, must unite in an alliance which will insist on arbitration as a means of settling disputes.

In 1870, Great Britain and the United States had a dispute which might well have led to war. Instead of fighting over it, however, they laid their trouble before a court of five men, a Swiss, an Italian, a Brazilian, an Englishman, and an American. This court, by a vote of four to one, decided against England, and England accepted the decision as final, although it cost her many millions of dollars.

The League to Enforce Peace must insist that each nation in the world maintain only a small force of soldiers, to be used as police for its own affairs, and there must be an international police to settle all differences between nations and to enforce the orders of the court of arbitration. In time (no one knows how soon) the people of Germany and Austria will be freed from the military rule which now has the power to hurl them into war. When that day arrives and they learn that they have been led astray by Treitschke and Bernhardi, who preached that war was a blessing to a nation and that only the powerful nations had the right to survive, they will know that "Thou shalt not kill" is just as strong a commandment today as when it first was uttered.

Sometime, nations will learn that other nations have the right to live, and that no country can wrong another through force of arms without suffering for it in the end. In a blunted conscience, in the loss of the sympathy of the rest of the world, in a lessening of the Christ-spirit of doing good to others, the nation which resorts to force to gratify its own selfish ends, like the individual, pays the full penalty for its misdeeds. It, was a great American who said, "The world is my country and mankind are my brothers."

Questions for Review

1. Why did England and the United States fail to understand Germany?

2. What right would Germany have had to an indemnity?