Well, Armageddon began and ran its horrid course. With the grim chronology of those dreary years this book is not concerned. It is with the aftermath that we here deal. And that is a sufficiently gloomy theme. The material losses are prodigious, the vital losses appalling, while the spiritual losses have well-nigh bankrupted the human soul.
Turning first to the material losses, they are of course in the broadest sense incalculable, but approximate estimates have been made. Perhaps the best of them is the analysis made by Professor Ernest L. Bogert, who places the direct costs of the war at $186,000,000,000 and the indirect costs at $151,000,000,000, thus arriving at the stupendous total of $337,000,000,000. These well-nigh inconceivable estimates still do not adequately represent the total losses, figured even in monetary terms, for, as Professor Bogert remarks: “The figures presented in this summary are both incomprehensible and appalling, yet even these do not take into account the effect of the war on life, human vitality, economic well-being, ethics, morality, or other phases of human relationships and activities which have been disorganized and injured. It is evident from the present disturbances in Europe that the real costs of the war cannot be measured by the direct money outlays of the belligerents during the five years of its duration, but that the very breakdown of modern economic society might be the price exacted.”[101]
Yet prodigious as has been the destruction of wealth, the destruction of life is even more serious. Wealth can sooner or later be replaced, while vital losses are, by their very nature, irreparable. Never before were such masses of men arrayed for mutual slaughter. During the late war nearly 60,000,000 soldiers were mobilized, and the combatants suffered 33,000,000 casualties, of whom nearly 8,000,000 were killed or died of disease, nearly 19,000,000 were wounded, and 7,000,000 taken prisoners. The greatest sufferer was Russia, which had over 9,000,000 casualties, while next in order came Germany with 6,000,000 and France with 4,500,000 casualties. The British Empire had 3,000,000 casualties. America’s losses were relatively slight, our total casualties being a trifle under 300,000.
And this is only the beginning of the story. The figures just quoted refer only to fighting men. They take no account of the civilian population. But the civilian losses were simply incalculable, especially in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. It is estimated that for every soldier killed, five civilians perished by hunger, exposure, disease, massacre, or heightened infant mortality. The civilian deaths in Poland and Russia are placed at many millions, while other millions died in Turkey and Serbia through massacre and starvation. One item alone will give some idea of the wastage of human life during the war. The deaths beyond the normal mortality due to influenza and pneumonia induced by the war are estimated at 4,000,000. The total loss of life directly attributable to the war is probably fully 40,000,000, while if decreased birth-rates be added the total would rise to nearly 50,000,000. Furthermore, so far as civilian deaths are concerned, the terrible conditions prevailing over a great part of Europe since the close of 1918 have caused additional losses relatively as severe as those during the war years.
The way in which Europe’s population has been literally decimated by the late war is shown by the example of France. In 1914 the population of France was 39,700,000. From this relatively moderate population nearly 8,000,000 men were mobilized during the war. Of these, nearly 1,400,000 were killed, 3,000,000 were wounded, and more than 400,000 were made prisoners. Of the wounded, between 800,000 and 900,000 were left permanent physical wrecks. Thus fully 2,000,000 men—mostly drawn from the flower of French manhood—were dead or hopelessly incapacitated.
Meanwhile, the civilian population was also shrinking. Omitting the civilian deaths in the northern departments under German occupation, the excess of deaths over births was more than 50,000 for 1914, and averaged nearly 300,000 for the four succeeding war years. And the most alarming feature was that these losses were mainly due, not to deaths of adults, but to a slump in the birth-rate. French births, which had been 600,000 in 1913, dropped to 315,000 in 1916 and 343,000 in 1917. All told, it seems probable that between 1913 and 1919 the population of France diminished by almost 3,000,000—nearly one-tenth of the entire population.
France’s vital losses are only typical of what has to a greater or less extent occurred all over Europe. The disgenic effect of the Great War is simply appalling. The war was nothing short of a headlong plunge into white race-suicide. It was essentially a civil war between closely related white stocks; a war wherein every physical and mental effective was gathered up and hurled into a hell of lethal machinery which killed out unerringly the youngest, the bravest, and the best.
Even in the first frenzied hours of August, 1914, wise men realized the horror that stood upon the threshold. The crowd might cheer, but the reflective already mourned in prospect the losses which were in store. As the English writer Harold Begbie then said: “Remember this. Among the young conscript soldiers of Europe who will die in thousands, and perhaps millions, are the very flower of civilization; we shall destroy brains which might have discovered for us in ten or twenty years easements for the worst of human pains and solutions for the worst of social dangers. We shall blot those souls out of our common existence. We shall destroy utterly those splendid burning spirits reaching out to enlighten our darkness. Our fathers destroyed those strange and valuable creatures whom they called ‘witches.’ We are destroying the brightest of our angels.”[102]
But it is doubtful if any of these seers realized the full price which the race was destined to pay during more than four long, agonizing years. Never before had war shown itself such an unerring gleaner of the best racial values. As early as the summer of 1915 Mr. Will Irwin, an American war correspondent, remarked the growing convictions among all classes, soldiers as well as civilians, that the war was fatally impoverishing the race. “I have talked,” he wrote, “with British officers and British Tommies, with English ladies of fashion and English housewives, with French deputies and French cabmen, and in all minds alike I find the same idea fixed—what is to become of the French race and the British race, yes, and the German race, if this thing keeps up?”
Mr. Irwin then goes on to describe the cumulative process by which the fittest were selected—for death.