Part 2

The western half of Bessarabia was taken back from Russia and restored to Turkey after the Crimean War, immediately after which, in 1861, the two principalities were united in the single principality of Rumania, under Colonel Cuza, a Rumanian, as Hospodar, or Lord, Turkish suzerainty being acknowledged. In this way the strip of Bessarabia which had been Russian for half a century became not Turkish, but Rumanian. When Russia declared war against Turkey in 1877 she announced to Rumania that she sought the restoration of her strip of Bessarabian land; and, knowing this, Rumania became Russia's ally in the war against Turkey, with Prince Carol as commander of her forces, he being of the Roman Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns. In 1881 he took the title of King, to which his nephew Ferdinand succeeded in 1914.

THE HETMAN OF THE UKRAINE

Writing in 1818, Byron described Mazeppa as "the Ukraine Hetman, calm and bold," and it is to the period of Mazeppa and even earlier that this title and office goes back. The word Hetman is of uncertain origin, but is probably derived from the Bohemian Heitman, a modification of Hauptmann or Headman. When the Ukraine, the "borderland," was under Polish suzerainty, in the period from 1592 to 1654, the epoch of "Fire and Sword," "Pan Michael," and "The Deluge," the Hetman of the Cossacks, (a Tartar word, kazak, meaning warrior,) was a semi-independent viceroy.

After the acceptance of Russian suzerainty by the Ukraine under the great Hetman, Khmelnitski, in 1654, the title and authority of the Hetman were at first continued, but his power and privileges were gradually curtailed and finally abolished. It is not certain whether the word Ataman is a modification of Hetman or a Tartar title; at any rate, we find the title, "Ataman of all the Cossacks," coming into use as an appanage of the Czarevitch, or heir apparent of Russia, somewhat as the title of Prince of Wales is an appanage of the heir apparent of England. The Czarevitch was represented by Hetmans by delegation, for each division of the Cossacks, these divisions being military colonies westward as far as the Caspian, like that described by Tolstoy in his novel, "The Cossacks."

Writing in 1799, W. Tooke, in his "View of the Russian Empire," described the insignia of the Hetman as being the truncheon, the national standard, the horsetail, kettledrums and signet, a group of emblems strongly suggesting Tartar influence; the dress of the Cossacks was, likewise, borrowed from that of the Caucasus Mohammedan tribes, and in this Caucasian dress the new Hetman of the Ukraine, Skoropadski, took office at Kiev. His name indicates that he is not a Ruthenian, (Little Russian,) but a Pole. It has been a consistent element of Austrian policy to favor the Poles at the expense of the Ruthenians, with the result that many Poles are strongly pro-Austrian, and hold high office under the Austrian crown.

PRECEDENTS FOR A SEPARATE ULSTER.

When the Dominion of Canada was formed by the British North America act of 1867, it included only four provinces, Upper and Lower Canada, (Ontario and Quebec,) Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Provision was made in the act for the voluntary admission of Prince Edward's Island, the Northwest Territories and Newfoundland into the Dominion. While the Northwest Territories took advantage of this provision, and are now organized as the Provinces of Manitoba, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, Newfoundland, with Labrador, the latter 120,000 square miles in area, preferred to remain outside the Dominion of Canada, and has a wholly distinct Constitution and administration, as independent of Canada as is that, for example, of British Guiana. Compulsion was never suggested to bring Newfoundland and Labrador within the Dominion of Canada, though Labrador is geographically a part of the Canadian mainland.

In Australia likewise the union of the colonies was entirely voluntary. Five of these, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Tasmania, by legislative enactments, approved by the direct vote of the electors, declared their desire for a federal union, and the Imperial Parliament gave effect to this by the act of July 9, 1900. This act provided for the inclusion of Western Australia in the Australian Commonwealth, if that colony so desired; and Western Australia shortly expressed and carried out that desire.

The population of Ulster in 1911 was 1,581,696, (that of Belfast being 386,947;) the population of Newfoundland with Labrador in 1914 was 251,726; the population of Western Australia when it exercised the option of inclusion in the Commonwealth of Australia was 184,114; it has since nearly doubled. A similar case of separate treatment, this time within the United States, is that of West Virginia, which, in 1862, determined to remain within the Union when the rest of Virginia seceded. West Virginia became a State on Dec. 31, 1862, and was not re-integrated in the Old Dominion at the close of the civil war.

COURT-MARTIAL IN ITALY.

Four principal Directors of the Genoese Electrical Power Company, named Königsheim, Ampt, Martelli, and Hess, early in April were sentenced to death by court-martial at Milan by being "shot in the spine," and a decoy girl was doomed to twenty years' imprisonment, while three associates were relegated to the galleys for life. It was proved that the condemned men received from Germany wireless messages, to be forwarded to North and South America for the purposes of its underseas campaign, and incriminating letters of their treasonable acts were discovered. Ampt and his three co-Directors received a decoration from the Imperial Government, but were so successful in deceiving the Italian Government that they were subsequently decorated as Cavalieres of the Crown of Italy.

AMERICAN TRADE PACT WITH NORWAY.

The signing of a general commercial agreement between the United States and Norway--the first agreement of the kind to be entered into by America with one of the North European neutrals--was announced by the War Trade Board on May 3, 1918. It was signed by Vance McCormick, Chairman of the War Trade Board, and Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, the famous explorer, who was sent to the United States at the head of a special mission.

Under the agreement Norway is assured of supplies to cover her estimated needs so far as they can be furnished without detriment to the war needs of the United States and its allies, and Norway, on her part, agrees to permit the exportation to America and its allies of all Norwegian products not needed for home consumption. It is provided that none of the supplies imported from the United States or its allies or forwarded with the aid of American bunker coal shall go directly or indirectly to the Central Powers or be used to replace commodities exported to those countries. This applies to anything produced by any auxiliaries to production obtained under the agreement. In consequence of the agreement the War Trade Board announced on May 9 that exports to Norway were about to be resumed.

Another result of the improved relations between the two countries was the chartering by the United States Shipping Board of 400,000 tons of Norwegian sailing ships, to be put in non-hazardous trades, thereby releasing other ships for traffic in the danger zones. This was one of the most substantial increases which the American-controlled merchant fleet has received since its inception.

BRITISH SHIPPING LOSSES

In the May issue of the Fortnightly Review of London appears the following analysis of the gains and losses of the British merchant navy since the outbreak of the war:

1914 (August to December.)

Tons. Tons.

Built 675,010? Total losses 468,728

Captured from enemy 753,500 Total gains 1,429,110 --------- --------- Total gains. 1,429,110 Balance +960,382

1915.

Built 650,919 Total losses 1,103,379

Captured from Total gains 662,419 enemy 11,500 --------- ------- Balance in Total gains. 662,419 1915 -440,000

Brought down from 1914 +960,382 --------- Balance at end of 1915 +519,422

1916.

Built 541,552 Total losses 1,497,848

Captured from Total gains 545,052 enemy 3,500 --------- ------- Balance in Total gains. 545,052 1916 -952,796

Brought down from 1915 +519,422 --------- Balance at end of 1916 -433,374

1917.

Built 1,163,474 Total losses 4,000,537

Captured from Total gains 1,174,974 enemy 11,500 ---------

Balance in Total gains 1,174,974 1917 -2,834,563

Brought down from 1916 -433,374 --------- Balance at end of 1917 -3,267,937

During the first three months of 1918 the net losses were 367,296 tons; 320,280 tons were built and 687,576 were lost, bringing the adverse balance on April 1, 1918, to 3,635,233 tons.

GREAT BRITAIN'S WAR EXPENSES

The British Government has issued a White Paper estimating the cost of the war for Great Britain in the year ending March 31, 1919, at $12,750,000,000, of which $9,305,000,000 is allocated to navy, army, air service, munition and ordnance factories, $205,000,000 to pensions, $750,000 to National War Aims Committee; services not specified, (presumed to include shipping,) $500,000,000; Treasury loans, $1,750,000,000; Board of Trade, $265,000,000; wheat supplies, $230,000,000, of which $200,000,000 is the estimated loss on the sale of the 18-cent loaf of bread. Subsidies toward the sale of potatoes are estimated at $25,000,000; purchases of wool and other raw materials are put at $40,000,000, payment to railways at $175,000,000, and $25,000,000 for timber.

HATRED BETWEEN ITALIANS AND AUSTRIANS

THE implacable hatred which has developed between Italians and Austrians is illustrated by the following Italian _communiqué_, issued in Rome on Feb. 11, in reply to the Austrian Supreme Command's denial that the Austro-Germans were first to bombard cities from airplanes. It points out that the Austro-Germans first bombarded Udine, Treviso, Padua, Verona, Venice, Ravenna, &c., massacring defenseless and innocent populations and ruining valuable art treasures, and adds:

The Italians went to Trieste not to bombard citizens and private houses, but the hydroplane stations in which are sheltered the assassins of Venice, and the two vessels of the Monarch type which were kept by the Imperial and Royal Navy behind the dyke, in the hope that the Italian elements of the city would help to protect them and afterward enable them to set out on some heroic enterprise against the defenseless localities on the Adriatic Coast. Immediately the hydroplanes, yielding to the indignation of the whole world, ceased bombarding Venice, and immediately the two vessels of the Monarch type were removed from Trieste, our aerial raids ceased, since an understanding was proposed.

We wage war against the enemy's armed forces, and not against women, children, monuments, and hospitals. In spite of the most solemn denial issued by the Austrians of the acts which, after the first bombardments of Padua, Treviso, and Vicenza at the end of December and the beginning of January, they declared to be a question of reprisals for bombardments, carried out by Franco-British aviators on

German towns, the Germans, in substance, gave to be understood what the Austrians hypocritically wished to hide, that is, that the pretext of reprisals enabled them to persevere with their nameless atrocities, which had been imposed upon them by some of their leaders having yielded to the impulses of a criminal mentality. Thus it happened that the Austrian Catholic command, bowing to the orders of the German Lutheran pastors, bombarded Catholic churches in the Italian cities. And so we see the Austro-Hungarian Government--so solicitous for peace and love between nations--sowing hatred which nothing can quench.

THE ORIGIN OF THE IRISH

Perhaps some light may be shed on the internal divisions which make the solution of the Irish question so nearly impossible by a realization of the fact that the population of Ireland consists of an unassimilated congeries of races, every element of which except one represents foreign invasion and conquest.

The earliest race, short, round-headed, dark, appears to be akin to the Ligurian race of the Mediterranean; this race hunted the huge Irish elks with flint arrows and axes, and may claim to be the real indigenous stock, still surviving in the west. The second race, tall, dark, long-headed, was akin to the Iberians (Basques) of Spain, who also invaded Western France, and who probably built the cromlechs and stone circles, since these are also found in Iberian Spain and Western France, as at Carnac in Brittany. The third race, tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed, came from the Baltic, bringing amber beads, and building chambered pyramids, such as are also found in Denmark. The fourth race to arrive included the Gaels, tall, round-headed, with red hair and gray eyes; they came from Central Europe, probably by way of France.

Each new arrival was followed by wars of conquest, the Gaels finally making themselves predominant, but not exterminating the older races, examples of whom may still be found, with unchanged race characteristics. In 1169 Norman French and Welsh came, as mercenaries in the army of the King of Leinster. The Burkes are descended from the Normans, the Fitzgeralds from the Welsh.

Battles in Picardy and Flanders

Military Review of All Fronts from April 17 to May 18, 1918.

In order to obtain a view of the situation of the German offensive on April 17, which forms a background for the events to be related in this review, it is necessary to point out a few controlling facts and conditions--some long obvious, some recently revealed.

Ludendorff's major plan, based on the assumed shortness of vision on the part of the Allies, to separate the British from the French and, by isolating the former in the north and driving the latter toward their bases in the south, thereby reach the mouth of the Somme, had failed. It had failed, just as did the plan of Napoleon at Charleroi in 1815 to separate the English from the Prussians. It failed because the military genius of the British General Carey and the French General Fayolle on two separate occasions had closed up gaps in the line of the Allies, and because the vast masses of German troops were incapable, on account of their demoralization, of making the fractures permanent.

It is now evident that the demoralization of General Gough's 5th Army, which began on March 23, not only threatened his junction with Byng's 3d Army, by forming an eight-mile gap between the two--into which, as has already been related, Carey moved his hastily gathered nondescript detachment--but as the 5th Army retreated another gap, gradually lengthening to nearly thirty miles, was opened between its right wing and the 6th French Army. Here General Fayolle, who had just appeared on the field from Italy, did with organized divisions what Carey had done with his scratch volunteers further north.

From statements made before the Reichstag Main Committee, but more especially from letters and diaries found on captured German officers, it appears that both Carey and Fayolle stopped an armed mob, utterly incapable of taking advantage of the situation it had created as a disciplined force. Regiments thrown together, officers separated from their commands, detachments without control, all due to the impetuous rush forward, could not recover in time to prevent Carey and Fayolle from completing their work.

But Ludendorff's major plan, having failed in the first month of his offensive, could not be repeated in the second. Since April 30 there has been no French, British, Belgian, Portuguese, or American front in Flanders or Picardy--only the front of the Allies, with the troops of their several nations used wherever needed by the supreme commander, Foch.

During the first month of the offensive two angles had been developed by Ludendorff: The first, the great one, in the south, from a base of sixty miles with a forty-mile perpendicular and its vertex near the Somme; the second in the north, from a base of twenty miles with a fifteen-mile perpendicular and its vertex on the edge of the Forest of Nieppe. Between these two angles the original front of Lens, from Bailleul north to Givenchy, still held, fifteen miles in length. There had been voluntary or forced changes made by the Allies east of Ypres and east of Arras.

The corollary in Flanders, unless it could be demonstrated, would be as great a failure as the main proposition in Picardy. And the still possible successful issue of the latter depended absolutely, as we shall see, on a complete demonstration of the former. Both have been so far handicapped by the augmenting mobility of the Allies, their growing numbers, their centralized command, and their successful insistence to control the air.

Such was the situation in Flanders and Picardy which confronted Ludendorff at the dawn of the second month of the German offensive. The whole problem to be solved was just as apparent to the Allies as it was to him--to gain the barriers which threatened his angles of penetration, in order again to utilize his preponderant forces of men and guns on a broad front. To attempt to extend the vertices without broadening the sides would mean to court danger, even destruction, at their weakest points.

His frontal attacks upon Ypres and Arras, respectively from the Passchendaele Ridge and against the Vimy Ridge, having failed, it became necessary to attempt to flank the Allies by the occupation of their defensive ridges. This explains his successful assaults upon Mont Kemmel, 325 feet high, and his desire to envelop Mont Rouge, 423 feet high, and his persistent attacks along the La Bassée Canal against the heights of Béthune, 141 feet, all preceded by diversions between the Somme and Avre, with concentrations at Villers-Bretonneux, Hangard, and elsewhere.

On April 18 the French made a feint on both banks of the Avre River south of Hangard, drove in a mile, and picked up some prisoners; simultaneously the Germans, with a force of 137,000, made a heavy assault upon the allied front lying across the La Bassée Canal, with a diversion on the Lys River near St. Venant. Before the day was done they had switched their attack to the Kemmel sector. In all three places the Germans suffered repulse, with the loss of a few hundred prisoners. Four days later the British advanced their lines on the Lys, just as the French had on the Avre. Then on the 24th came the great enemy diversion at Villers-Bretonneux, nine miles southeast of Amiens. Here the Germans used tanks for the first time. The village, lost to the British on the first day, was recovered on the second, when just to the south the French and American troops were hotly contesting with the Germans the possession of Hangard. The sharp salient at this place made it difficult for the Allies to hold, while its retention, except as a site from which losses could be inflicted on the Germans, was unnecessary. Consequently it was evacuated, after the attacking detachment of the Prussian Guards had been annihilated.

BATTLE FOR MONT KEMMEL

Meanwhile the Germans had been preparing for a decisive assault against Mont Kemmel with ever-augmenting artillery fire and with the concentration of vast numbers of troops on the sidings of the railroad between the villages of Messines and Wytschaete. These troops numbered nine divisions, or about 120,000 men. From the 24th till the 27th they incessantly swung around Mont Kemmel in massed front and flank attacks, until the French and British were forced to give up the height, together with the village of the same name and the village of Dranoutre, retiring on La Clytte and Scherpenberg.

The occupation of Mont Kemmel, however, did not, as Ludendorff had anticipated, force the British out of the Ypres salient, for their voluntary retirement from part of the Passchendaele Ridge on April 17-19 had strengthened the salient, which could hold as long as the line of hills west of Kemmel held--Mont Rouge, Mont Diviagne, Mont des Cats, &c.

The Berlin publicity bureau advertised the fact that a direct thrust at Ypres had brought the Germans to within three miles of the town--an achievement of no particular military value--while it quite ignored the capture of Mont Kemmel, for the simple reason that its value was now discovered to repose in their ability to carry their occupation throughout the entire range.

This they have since been vainly, except for local advances, trying to do, often employing great forces of men in mass for two or three days at a time--striving vainly to broaden the salient in three places: between Dickebusch and Voormezeele, due south from Ypres; by an envelopment of Mont Rouge to the southwest; on the south by an advance in the direction of Béthune.

VON ARNIM'S EFFORTS

In the northern part of the salient the attacks reached their climax on Monday, April 29, when General Sixt von Arnim's army was hurled in wave after wave between Voormezeele and Scherpenberg and on the latter and Mont Rouge, only to end in a repulse, which, on account of the number of men believed to have been lost by the enemy, may be considered a disastrous defeat. All this time a heavy bombardment had been going on in the Béthune region in preparation for an infantry attack there; yet on account of the defeat further north, it could not be delivered.