Chapter 25

The Cost of It All

What war debts mean—The devastation of farms and villages—Diseases which travel with war—The men picked to die first—The survivors and their children—The effect on France of Napoleon’s wars—What Hannibal did to Rome—What happened to the Franks—Sweden before and after the wars of Charles XII—Europe at the close of the Great War

In the meanwhile, all the countries in the war were rapidly rushing toward bankruptcy. England spent $30,000,000 a day; France, Germany, and Austria nearly as much apiece. Thus in the course of a year, a debt of $300 was piled upon every man, woman, and child in the British kingdom. The average family consists of five persons, so that this means a debt of $1500 per family for each year that the war lasted. The income of the average family in Great Britain is less than $500 in a year, and the amount of money that they can save out of this sum is very small. Yet the British people are obliged to add this tremendous debt to the already very large amount that they owe, and will have to go on paying interest on it for hundreds of years.

In the same fashion, debts piled up for the peoples of France, Germany, Austria, Russia and all the countries in the war. In spite of what we have said above of the average income of English families, Great Britain is rich when compared with Austria and Russia. What is more, Great Britain is practically unscarred, while on the continent great tracts of land which used to be well cultivated farms have been laid waste with reckless abandon. East Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, part of Hungary, Alsace, Serbia, Bosnia, northern France, south-western Austria-Hungary, and all of Belgium and Roumania, a territory amounting to one-fifth of the whole of Europe, were scarred and burned and devastated.

It will be years and years before these countries recover from the effects of war’s invasion. For every man killed on the field of battle, it is estimated that two people die among the noncombatants. Children whose fathers are at the front, frail women trying to do the work of men, aged inhabitants of destroyed villages die by the thousands from want of food and shelter.

In the trail of war come other evils. People do not have time to look after their health or even to keep clean. As a result, diseases like the plagues of olden times, which civilization thought it had killed, come to life again and destroy whole cities. The dreadful typhus fever killed off one-fifth of the population of Serbia during the winter of 1914. Cholera raged among the Austrian troops in the fall of the same year. For every soldier who is killed on the field of battle, three others die from disease or wounds or lack of proper care.

In time of war, the first men picked are the very flower of the country, the strong, the athletic, the brave, the very sort of men who ought to be carefully saved as the fathers of the people to come. As these are killed or disabled, governments draw on the older men who are still vigorous and hardy. Then finally they call out the unfit, the sickly, the weak, the aged, and the young boys. As a general rule, the members of this last class make up the bulk of the men who survive the war. They, instead of the strong and healthy, become the fathers of the next generation of children.

In the days of the Roman republic, 220 years B.C., there stood on the coast of North Africa a city named Carthage, which, like Rome, owned lands far and near. Carthage would have been satisfied to “live and let live,” but Rome would not have it so. As a result, the two cities engaged in three terrible wars which ended in the destruction of Carthage. But before Carthage was finally blotted off the map, her great general, Hannibal, dealt Rome a blow which brought her to her knees, and came very near destroying her completely. Five Roman armies, averaging 30,000 men apiece, he trapped and slaughtered. The death of these 150,000 men was a loss from which Rome never recovered. From this time on, her citizens were made of poorer stuff, and the old Roman courage and Roman honor and Roman free government began to decline.

The Germanic tribes (the Goths, Franks, Lombards, etc.) who swarmed into the Roman Empire about the year 400 A.D., although they were barbarians, nevertheless had many excellent qualities. They were brave, hardy men and stood for freedom from tyrants. However, they fought so many wars that they were gradually killed off. Take the Franks, for example; the three grandsons of Charlemagne, who had divided up his great empire, fought a disastrous war with one another, which ended in a great battle that almost wiped out the Frankish nation. This happened about 840 A.D.

Sweden was once one of the great powers of Europe. However, about 1700 A.D., she had a king named Charles XII, who tried to conquer Russia and Poland. He was finally defeated at a little town in the southern part of Russia nearly a thousand miles away from home, and his great army was wiped out. After his time, Sweden sank to the level of a second class nation. The bodies of her best men had been strewn on battlefields reaching from the Gulf of Bothnia to the Black Sea.

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?