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 class 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 class nation. The bodies of her best men had been strewn on battlefields reaching from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Black Sea.
Charles XII of Sweden