A nation that is worn out and bled white has no colonies, or, if she has, these same colonies are likewise bloodless and worn out. The French colonial empire remains intact while the German colonial empire has disappeared from the face of the earth. The support the colonies brought to the mother country is wonderful and deserves a separate study on its own account.
Here is the picture the celebrated German colonial empire offers.
In 1914 Germany possessed a colonial empire two million square kilometers in area. It represented approximately four times the area of the German Empire, and before the war its exports amounted to about one hundred millions of francs or twenty-five millions of dollars. There were German Southwest Africa, 35,000 square kilometers in extent, with 1,750 kilometers of railroads, with its copper and diamond mines, its metals which were worth commercially thirty-seven millions of marks in 1911; German East Africa, twice as big as the German Empire, having 1,225 kilometers of railroads, with its harbors where nine hundred and thirty-three merchant ships had touched in 1911; German New Guinea, as large as two-thirds of Prussia, with its rich deposits of gold and coal, its maritime commerce of 240,000 tons; the Samoan Islands, one single port of which, Apia, was visited by one hundred and ten steamers in a year; Tsing-Tao which, in 1911, had exported 32,500,000 marks' worth of merchandise, whose maritime interest was represented by five hundred and ninety steamers which carried a million tons of freight. All that has fallen away; all that is actually in the hands of the Allies.
The conquest was difficult; it was finished only in 1916. An order of the day of General Aymerich, commander-in-chief of the troops which conquered Kameroon, points with brief eloquence to some of the difficulties which have been overcome:
Officers, Europeans and troops who are natives of Africa and Belgian Congo.
At the cost of hardship and unheard-of efforts, you have just wrenched from the Germans one of their best and richest colonies.
Followed without a minute's respite from possession to possession, the enemy has been obliged to abandon the last bit of Kameroon. For eighteen months you have experienced the torrid heat of the days and the cold dampness of the nights without a change, you have been under the torrential equatorial rains, you have traversed impassable forests and fetid marshes, you have without a rest taken the enemy's positions one after another, leaving dead in each one a number of your comrades. Lacking food and often without munitions, with your clothing in tatters, you have continued your glorious march without complaint or murmur, until you have attained the end for which you set out.
In this conquest France played a large part, just as was the case in the conquest of Togoland, with her Senegalese Tirailleurs, the famous Tirailleurs, so much decried and discussed before the war, who were to win the admiration of the English generals under whose orders they fought.
It is appropriate to cite here the order of the day of the commanding officer of these troops, because it shows us a side of the colonial wars, about which little has been said: