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
- How does a nation at war increase its debts?
- Why do diseases thrive in war time?
- What became of the Goths and Franks?
- Why was the reign of Charles XII disastrous to Sweden?
- What was the effect of Napoleon’s many wars upon the strength of the French nation?
- 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 Japan, 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 assemble 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.