Physical Recovery in Europe
In many ways the recovery of Europe was more rapid in its fundamental needs of life than seemed possible after the devastation of war. Human energy, faith and hope repaired the material damage of war in an almost miraculous degree. Walking day by day across the battlefields of France and Flanders it seemed impossible to me and to all others that the ground upheaved by high explosives, criss-crossed with deep trenches, and sown with unexploded shells would return within the lifetime of the present generation to harvest fields and pleasant pasture. It was incredible that all those villages blown off the map, so that there were only rubbish heaps to mark their site, should be rebuilt within half a century with new walls and sheltering roofs for the people who had fled from them.
I never expected to see a new city of Ypres, or to walk past shop windows in Arras, or to see a harvest gathered on the outskirts of a new Peronne. The infernal track of war from Belgium to Switzerland, littered with dead bodies and the wreckage of battle, could not be wiped out, I thought, from the eyes of living men. But that has happened at least along some parts of the line ten years after. There are red roofs and busy streets in Ypres and Arras. The fields are smooth and green around Peronne. There are houses at Passchendaele. It is difficult to see the scars of war in Amiens. It is hard to find trenches and dug-outs or places where monstrous battles happened beyond the Menin Gate of Ypres or down by Lens, beyond the Vimy Ridge. Peasants dug out the unexploded shells. The trenches silted in or were ploughed in. The Belgians were as busy as bees when they returned to the hive. French contractors hired Poles and Czechs to supplement their French labour and made enormous fortunes in the reconstruction of destroyed towns at the cost of the French Government, which accepted all their claims until an orgy of corruption broke all bounds. In East Prussia, destroyed by Russian cavalry, little red houses were put up even more quickly because of German industry. In Italy many wounds were hidden and healed. There is still much work to be done, especially in France, most terribly mutilated; but, ten years after, the work of reconstruction by the energy of men and women, desperate in their desire to blot out the years of agony and get back to peaceful labours and their old home life, is a splendid victory over the forces of destruction. Life triumphs over death, as always in history.
So also the stricken peoples staggered up from the bog of misery into which they were deep sunk after war. The land saved the cities, and the peasants found the source of life in the kind earth again. One nation above all helped them to tide over the lean years and live until they could reap new harvests. Without that rescue, millions more would have died and Europe would have been swept by pestilence and famine. The people of the United States did a work of charity on behalf of the starving folk of Europe, more especially in the rescue of the starving children, which absolves them, if they need absolution, from the charge of utter selfishness and indifference to the sufferings of that Europe from which they drew back in a policy of isolation.
It is one of the paradoxes of recent history that while the American people, hardened against the Wilson ideal of co-operation with Europe, drew away from the League of Nations as an accursed thing with which they would have no part or lot, and reasserted the Monroe Doctrine with a new interpretation of narrow exclusiveness, they gave with their left hand, nearest to the heart, what their right hand refused. Publicly they said, “Let Europe stew in its own broth.” Privately they poured out their dollars in charity for European relief.