The Transportation of Troops in Great Wars
The announcement on June 15 that the United States had successfully carried over three-quarters of a million troops to France, a distance of more than 3,000 miles by sea, with the statement, made at the same time, that the Allies had successfully transported the enormous number of 17,000,000 to and from the various battle zones, both with absolutely negligible losses, serves to bring up the interesting question of the movements of vast bodies of men in earlier wars. Leaving out the primitive wars, in which troops were moved only by land, and almost wholly on foot, to begin with the great Persian invasion of Europe, in the fifth century before our era: Xerxes transported an enormous army, fabled to number five millions, and certainly reaching nearly half a million combatants, across the water-barrier of Europe by building a pontoon bridge over the Hellespont, between three and four miles wide; but the Persians had also, at Salamis, between 1,000 and 1,200 ships, which was a sufficiently great achievement in transportation. On the return invasion of Asia by the Greeks, Alexander the Great likewise crossed the Hellespont, at the site of the Gallipoli fighting, by a bridge of boats; the latest crossing of a great army on pontoons being that of the Russians at the Danube, when they invaded Turkey in 1877. A feat in transportation of another kind was that of Hannibal, who carried his mixed army of Africans, Spaniards, and Gauls across the Alps, probably at Mont Genevre, in the Summer of 218; an achievement later repeated by Napoleon and the Russian General Suvoroff. A more recent feat in transportation was the bringing of British and French troops to America, in the days of Washington. But the closest analogy to the present achievement of the American Army and Navy is probably that of the transportation of British troops to South Africa, twenty years ago, the distance being over 6,000 miles, or about twice the distance of our Atlantic port from the landing place of our troops in France. The total British losses in South Africa have more than once been equaled by one week's British casualties in the present struggle in France, the ratio of killed to wounded being about the same, namely, one to five.
Armies Under Foreign Generals
The brigading of American troops with French and English commands and the fact that the entire forces of England and Italy, as well as America, on the Continent, are commanded by a French soldier recall that in many past wars large forces of one nation served under leaders of another nation. In the Napoleonic wars there were numberless instances of these armies of composite nationality, the most striking example being, probably, the Grand Army which invaded Russia in 1811, in which there was only a minority of French soldiers, nearly all Western Europe contributing the majority. But these foreign troops served by compulsion, not of good-will. A better analogy is the war of the Spanish succession, in which both the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene commanded composite armies, voluntarily united; this war transferred Newfoundland and Nova Scotia from France to England. In the wars in India, English commanders have almost invariably had a majority of native troops in their forces, and this was conspicuously the case in the second half of the eighteenth century, as in Clive's decisive victory at Plassey.
Considerable numbers of French troops served under an American Commander in Chief at an eventful period in this country's history; of the 16,000 who forced the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, about half were French troops, under Lafayette and Rochambeau. A generation later, when Napoleon was trying to subdue Spain, mixed forces of English, Portuguese, and Spanish troops fought, under the Duke of Wellington and his colleagues, against the invaders. At Waterloo also the Duke of Wellington had an army of several different nationalities under his command, though the Dutch and Belgian troops played no great part in the later stages of the battle. In the war of 1877, considerable Russian and Rumanian armies fought under a single commander who was, for a considerable period, Prince Charles (later King) of Rumania.
The Northern and Southern Slavs
The conference at Rome, April 10, 1918, to settle outstanding questions between the Italians and the Slavs of the Adriatic, has once more drawn attention to those Slavonic peoples in Europe who are under non-Slavonic rule. At the beginning of the war there were three great Slavonic groups in Europe: First, the Russians with the Little Russians, speaking languages not more different than the dialect of Yorkshire is from the dialect of Devonshire; second, a central group, including the Poles, the Czechs or Bohemians, the Moravians, and Slovaks, this group thus being separated under the four crowns of Russia, Germany, Austria, and Hungary; the third, the southern group, included the Sclavonians, the Croatians, the Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, the Slavs, generally called Slovenes, in the western portion of Austria, down to Goritzia, and also the two independent kingdoms of Montenegro and Serbia.
Like the central group, this southern group of Slavs was divided under four crowns, Hungary, Austria, Montenegro, and Serbia; but, in spite of the fact that half belong to the Western and half to the Eastern Church, they are all essentially the same people, though with considerable infusion of non-Slavonic blood, there being a good deal of Turkish blood in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The languages, however, are practically identical, formed largely of pure Slavonic materials, and, curiously, much more closely connected with the eastern Slav group—Russia and Little Russia—than with the central group, Polish and Bohemian. A Russian of Moscow will find it much easier to understand a Slovene from Goritzia than a Pole from Warsaw. The Ruthenians, in Southern Galicia and Bukowina, are identical in race and speech with the Little Russians of Ukrainia.
Of the central group, the Poles have generally inclined to Austria, which has always supported the Polish landlords of Galicia against the Ruthenian peasantry; while the Czechs have been not so much anti-Austrian as anti-German. Indeed, the Hapsburg rulers have again and again played these Slavs off against their German subjects. It was the Southern Slav question, as affecting Serbia and Austria, that gave the pretext for the present war. At this moment, the central Slav question—the future destiny of the Poles—is a bone of contention between Austria and Germany. It is the custom to call these Southern Slavs "Jugoslavs," from the Slav word Yugo, "south," but as this is a concession to German transliteration, many prefer to write the word "Yugoslav," which represents its pronunciation. The South Slav question was created by the incursions of three Asiatic peoples—Huns, Magyars, Turks—who broke up the originally continuous Slav territory that ran from the White Sea to the confines of Greece and the Adriatic.