Part 3

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.

DRUNKENNESS REDUCED IN GREAT BRITAIN

The result of the control of the liquor traffic in Great Britain is shown by the following figures of convictions for drunkenness in the years named, the upper line of figures referring to males, the lower line to females:

Greater London--Population, (1911,) 7,486,964

1913. 1914. 1915. 1916. 1917.

48,535 49,077 35,866 19,478 10,931 16,953 18,577 15,970 9,975 5,736 ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ 65,488 67,654 51,836 29,453 16,667

Boroughs, (36,) England and Wales-- Population, (1911,) 8,406,372

41,380 38,577 27,041 17,233 9,870 11,399 11,258 9,959 6,097 3,679 ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ 52,779 49,835 37,000 23,330 13,549 ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ 89,915 87,654 62,907 36,711 20,801 28,352 29,835 25,929 16,072 9,415 ------- ------- ------ ------ ------ 118,267 117,489 88,836 52,783 30,216

In England and Wales the deaths due to or connected with alcoholism (excluding cirrhosis of the liver) fell from 1,112 (males) and 719 (females) in 1913 to 358 (males) and 222 (females) in 1917; deaths due to cirrhosis of the liver, from 2,215 (males) and 1,665 (females) to 1,475 (males) and 808 (females); cases of attempted suicide, from 1,458 (males) and 968 (females) to 483 (males) and 452 (females); deaths from suffocation of infants under one year declined from 1,226 to 704.

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GERMANY'S POPULATION DECLINING

A careful study of the vital statistics of Germany and Great Britain reveals the fact that the population of Germany is declining, while that of Great Britain is increasing. The German Empire, which in June, 1919, at the previous rate of increase should have had 72,000,000 people, will have no more than 64,500,000. Germany as a whole will have 5 per cent. less population than when the war began. Of those who have been killed the greater number were men in the prime of life and energy, whom Germany could least spare. By deaths in the battle zone the empire has lost at least 3,000,000 men.

The birth rate has sunk to such a figure that by next year the number of births will have fallen short of what they would have been had there been no war by 3,333,000. In the same period the annual number of deaths among the German civilian population, owing to the stress and anxiety of the war, and sickness, which has been aggravated by hardships and food troubles, has increased by 1,000,000 over the normal.

While by next year the German Empire will be 7,500,000 lower in population than it would have been had the war not taken place, the vitality of the peoples of Austria and Hungary has suffered even more. The peoples of Austria will be 11 per cent. poorer in numbers next year than if the war had not taken place. They will be 8 per cent. lower in numbers than they were in 1914. Hungary will be still worse off. It will have a population 9 per cent. lower than before the war, and 13 per cent. lower than it would have been if there had been no war.

Meanwhile, despite the losses suffered in the war zone, the British population has been growing. By the middle of 1919 this population will be only 3 per cent. lower than it would have been without war. Great Britain in 1919 will have a larger population than in 1914.

CAIRO TO JERUSALEM BY RAIL

It was officially announced May 11 that the swing bridge over the Suez Canal at Kantara was completed, and that on May 15, 1918, there was direct railway service from Cairo to Jerusalem. When the war broke out there were no railways between the Suez Canal and the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway, a distance of some 200 miles, mainly desert.

At that time a line ran along the western bank of the canal from Suez to Port Said. It was linked up with the main lines of the Egyptian State railways by a single track from Ismailia to Zagazig.

A few miles to the north of that track another line from Zagazig stopped some eighteen miles short of the canal at El Salhia. At the beginning of the war, to facilitate the transport of troops and supplies to the canal and beyond, the track from Zagazig to Ismailia was doubled, and a new line was pushed out from the dead end at El Salhia to the canal opposite Kantara, a village on the eastern, or Sinai, side of the canal. Later, when the British troops entered the Sinai Peninsula, a railway was begun from Kantara eastward, and as the British troops advanced so did the railway. It followed the northern track across Sinai, and had been taken within a few miles of Gaza when that town was captured last November. Meantime the Turks had built a branch from the Jaffa-Jerusalem line to a point only five miles north of Gaza, and by February General Allenby had joined the two systems, so that there was direct railway connection between Kantara and Jerusalem.

KINDLING THE HOLY FIRE

The annual ceremony of the Kindling of the Holy Fire took place May 4 in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In Turkish days it was the custom to provide a guard of not less than 600 soldiers in order to keep the peace between the Greeks and Armenians, as disorders almost invariably occurred. On this occasion there was no guard of any kind other than the ordinary police, and the ceremony took place without any sign of disturbance.

The ceremony of the Holy Fire--at which, it is held, flame comes by a miracle from heaven to kindle the lamps of the Holy Sepulchre--apparently began in the ninth century, and was formerly attended by leading representatives of all the churches. These have long ago withdrawn from it, and it is now attended by members of the Greek and Armenian Churches, mostly ignorant pilgrims of Eastern Christendom. Many enlightened members of the Greek Church discouraged the ceremony, as the vast crowds of frenzied people attending it had to be kept in some sort of order by Turkish soldiers. At the appointed time a bright flame of burning wood appears through a hole in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre; the rush to obtain this new fire is overwhelming, and it is handed on from taper to taper until thousands of lights appear. A mounted horseman takes a lighted torch to convey the sacred fire to the lamp of the Greek Church in the convent at Bethlehem. In 1834 hundreds of lives were lost in the violent pressure of the unruly crowd.

BUILDING THE CAPE TO CAIRO RAILWAY

Notwithstanding the war, 200 miles of the Cape to Cairo Railway in Africa were laid in the last four years, and a total of 450 miles in the last eight years from the Rhodesian frontier to the navigable waterway of the Congo. The latest section of the Katanga Railway reached Bukama, on the Congo River, May 22.

The railway starts from Cape Town and crosses Bechuanaland and Rhodesia; it reached the Congo frontier in 1909. The first section (158 miles) reached the copper mines of the Star of the Congo in November, 1910, where Elizabethville, a populous town, inhabited by 1,400 white men, has since developed. The railway was pushed in 1913 as far as Kambové, another important mining district, (99 miles.) In spite of the difficulties caused by the war, a third section was open to traffic north of Kambové, reaching Djilongo (68 miles) in July, 1915. It was through this road that the two English monitors, under the direction of Commander G. B. Spicer Simson, reached the waters of Lake Tanganyika, which they cleared of enemy craft. Understanding the advantages which the line would afford, the Belgian Colonial Government opened new credits for the completion of the railway as far as Bukama, (125 miles.) The building started from Djilongo and Bukama at the same time, and, in spite of the difficulties of the ground and the scarcity of labor in the region traversed, has now been successfully completed. More than 30,000 tons of copper are annually transported from the Congo copper mines.

COMPIEGNE AND ITS FOREST

Compiegne, the northern support of the French battlefront during the early part of June, goes back to Roman days. Its name is a modernization of Compendium, which seems to have meant the "short cut" between Soissons and Beauvais. The castle, which was founded by Charles the Bald, was rebuilt by Charles V. and Louis XV. It is now practically a historical museum of pictures, sculpture, vases, beautiful French furniture. The Hôtel de Ville, the Town Hall, was built under Louis XII., and is now adorned by a recent statue of Jeanne d'Arc, whose cult has been so widely revived in the last few years in France. And the old churches of Saint James and Saint Antony go back to the France of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. The magnificent forest of Compiègne, with its century-old oaks and beeches, covers some 36,000 acres, or almost sixty square miles, and has nearly ninety miles of parkways under its shady boughs. Within it, near Champlieu, are old Roman ruins, and the huge, many-towered Château of Pierrefonds, which was a favorite hunting lodge of the Kings of France. Built in the fourteenth century, it was rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc. It is curious that the modern use of airplanes in military scouting, in conjunction with our powerful artillery, has given these forests a significance in battle which takes us back not merely to the days of mediaeval warfare with its forest ambushes but to the earlier fighting of primitive tribes.

THE FOREST OF VILLERS-COTTERETS

The immense importance of forests in the present battle is only one among many returns to the machinery of mediaeval war, like the revival of helmets, bombs, mortars, the use of a trench knife, which is simply an adapted Roman broadsword. And, in exactly the same way, the pressure of races in the present war has brought the fighting back to the old, famous battle areas, on which the Latin races have fought against the barbarians any time these two thousand years. This is particularly true of the area of the fighting in the first half of June. Much of the history here goes back to old Roman times, much to the earliest Kings of France. Villers-Cotterets, in the old feudal territory of Valois, has developed from a sixth century hamlet, first named Villers-Saint-Georges. The great forest, which has been so strong a buttress for the French and American line, was then known as Col-de-Retz, and was a favorite hunting ground of the early Kings. The Château Malmaison, rebuilt by Francis I. in 1530, was really a magnificent hunting lodge; his son, Henry II., and Francis II. often sojourned there. Charles V. halted there during his campaign in Champagne. Charles IX. spent his honeymoon there with his young Queen Elizabeth. The castle was restored by the Duke of Orleans in 1750, at a cost of 2,000,000 francs, when the great walls of the park were built. He was the father of Philippe-Egalité and the grandfather of King Louis Philippe. Alexandre Dumas, who was born at Villers-Cotterets, described the castle as being "as big as the whole town." Later it became an orphanage, sheltering 800 children. In the forest is the "enchanted butte," 752 feet above sea level, which is dimly visible from Laon, forty-four miles away; here the fairies were traditionally believed to dance in the moonlight. Finally, in the last martial act of Napoleon's Hundred Days--on June 27, 1815, a week after Waterloo--Marshal Grouchy fought the Prussians under Pirch within sight of Villers-Cotterets.

CHATEAU-THIERRY

Chateau-Thierry, which has added a splendid page to the martial history of the American Army, is another of the ancient strongholds whose strategic position has given it equal significance in the recent fighting. It was originally a Roman camp, Castrum Theodorici. The castle, built in 730 by Charles Martel, was given in 877 by Louis II., "the Stammerer," to Herbert, Count of Vermandois, from whose family it passed in the tenth century to the Counts of Troyes. At the end of the eleventh century the town, which had grown up under the shelter of the fortress, was surrounded by a wall, and the Burgesses of the town, in 1520, received permission from Francis I. to found a leather and cloth fair, which was long famous. Often a battleground, Château-Thierry was captured by the English in 1421. It was sacked by the Spanish in 1591. It was a centre of French resistance in the invasion of 1814, and Napoleon with 24,000 veterans decisively beat Blücher with 50,000 men under the historic walls of the ancient fortress. The fabulist La Fontaine was born here on July 8, 1621.

INFANT WELFARE IN GERMANY

The British Local Government Board issued a report on infant welfare in Germany, May 17, 1918, from which the following facts are taken:

During the war there has been a heavy fall in the number of births in Germany. The first three years alone of the war reduced by over 2,000,000 the number of babies who would have been born had peace prevailed. Some 40 per cent. fewer babies were born in 1916 than in 1913. The infantile death rate has been kept well down, but is 50 per cent. higher than in Great Britain.

The birth rate, which had risen from 36.1 per 1,000 inhabitants in the decade 1841-1850 to 39.1 per 1,000 in the period 1871-1880, fell in the succeeding decades to 36.8, 36.1, and 31.9. The rate for the last year of the period 1901-1910 was under 30 per 1,000, and the continuance of the fall brought the rate as low as 28.3 in 1912.

In 1913 there were 1,839,000 live births in Germany; in 1916 there were only 1,103,000--a decrease of 40 per cent. as compared with 1913. The corresponding figures for England and Wales (785,520 live births in 1916 against 881,890 in 1913) show a decrease of 10.9 per cent.

In 1913 the infant mortality rate for Germany was 151 per 1,000, as compared with 108 in England and Wales. The rates in 1914 for Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria (comprising nearly 80 per cent. of the total population of Germany) were 164, 173, and 193 per 1,000 respectively. The abnormal increase in infant mortality during the first months of the war is shown by the fact that in Prussia in the third quarter of 1914 the rate rose from 128 to 143; in Saxony from 140 to 242; and in Bavaria from 170 to 239.

The principal measure adopted in Germany to promote infant welfare during the war has been the distribution of the imperial maternity grants. "Necessity" must first be proved, but instructions have been given that the term "necessity" is to be liberally interpreted. There was a general demand that some further provision should be made for soldiers' wives who could not meet the extra expenses connected with the birth of a child, and by a Federal Order, published on Dec. 3, 1914, provision was made for the payment (partly from imperial funds and partly from the funds of the sickness insurance societies) of the following allowances:

(a) A single payment of $6.25 toward the expenses of confinement.

(b) An allowance of 25 cents daily, including Sundays and holidays, for eight weeks, at least six of which must be after the confinement.

(d) A grant up to $2.50 for medical attendance during pregnancy if needed.

(d) An allowance for breast-feeding at the rate of 12-1/2 cents a day, including Sundays and holidays, for 12 weeks after confinement.

These grants were afterward extended to women whose husbands were employed on patriotic auxiliary service and women who were themselves employed on such service. In addition to this special measure, steps were taken to encourage the formation of local societies for promoting infant welfare and the establishment by the societies of infant welfare centres. Steps were taken to protect illegitimate children by assisting unmarried mothers from municipal funds and to give expectant and nursing mothers additional rations of food.

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As a result of intensive farming propaganda, the acreage of cereals and potatoes in England and Wales in 1917 was 8,302,000, an increase of 2,042,000 over 1916. It is estimated that the tillage in 1917 in Scotland increased 300,000 acres over 1916, and in Ireland the figures showed an increase of 1,500,000 acres, making a total of about 4,000,000 acres increase in the United Kingdom in the year. This was accomplished in the face of the fact that in England and Wales alone there were 200,000 fewer male laborers on the land in 1917 than before the war. It is estimated that the United Kingdom in 1918-19 will produce 80 per cent. of the total breadstuff requirements for the year, whereas in 1916-17 the production was but 20 per cent. of the needs.

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The volunteers furnished by Ireland, divided between Ulster and the rest of the country, were as follows:

Rest of Year. Ulster. Ireland. Total. 1914 26,283 17,851 44,134 1915 19,020 27,351 46,371 1916 7,305 11,752 19,057 1917 5,830 8,193 14,023 ------ ------ ------- 58,438 65,147 123,585

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The Parliamentary Under Secretary to the British War Office, Mr. Macpherson, in a statement in Parliament, May 3, 1918, gave the following figures of Chaplains in the war, killed, died of wounds, or died of disease while on service in the war. The figures do not include colonial Chaplains or the Chaplains of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishment:

Church of England 57 Roman Catholic 19 Presbyterian 4 Methodist 3 United Board 3 -- Total 86

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The Government of Costa Rica declared war on Germany May 23, 1918, bringing the number of nations aligned against the Central Powers to a total of twenty-one. Of the other Central American States Panama, Nicaragua, and Guatemala had issued declarations of war. Honduras severed diplomatic relations, and San Salvador proclaimed neutrality, but explained that it was friendly to the United States. The Government of Peru seized 50,000 tons of interned German ships, and the Government of Chile is negotiating with the United States for the seizure, by appropriation or sale to this country, of 200,000 tons interned in its ports.

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The Second American Red Cross drive was begun on May 20. The final subscriptions, as announced on May 28, were $148,833,367, an oversubscription of more than $48,000,000. The subscriptions in New York City exceeded $33,000,000; in the rest of New York State they were about $9,000,000. The oversubscription maintained a similar average in all parts of the country.

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When the Germans came in possession of Helsingfors there were seven British submarines in the Baltic with stores, workshops, and barges for floating mechanics, which had been moved into the harbor from different parts of the Baltic as the Germans advanced into Russia. The British naval contingent was in charge of Lieut. Commander Downie, and when it was apparent that the Germans would come in possession of the harbor the entire property was destroyed, including all the submarines, repair shops, and supplies, estimated in value at $15,000,000.

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Andrew Bonar Law, Chancellor of the British Exchequer, in introducing a new vote of credit in Parliament June 18, announced that it was felt that the German offensive in France had wholly failed and that the Austrian offensive in Italy was the war's worst initial failure. He extolled America's aid in the war and the brilliant part taken already by American troops. He moved a vote of credit of $2,500,000,000, which was promptly given. The vote brought the total British war credits to $36,500,000,000. It will cover expenditures to Sept. 1, 1918. Bonar Law stated that the daily cost of the war to Great Britain was $34,240,000. The debt due Great Britain from her allies was stated to be $6,850,000,000, and from the Dominions $1,030,000,000.

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It was announced June 16 that an American contingent had been assigned to the Vosges Mountains in Alsace in territory which belonged to Germany prior to the war. Private W. J. Gwyton of Evart, Mich., of this force was the first American killed on former German soil, having met his death by machine-gun fire on the day after the unit entered the line, (May 27, 1918.) He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Battles in France and Italy