A second raid was attempted a few weeks later but by this time the British were on the watch. Two of the best German cruisers were sunk and the others barely escaped the fire of the avengers.

About the first of June, 1916, a goodly portion of the German fleet sailed out, hoping to catch the British unawares. They were successful in sinking several large ships, but when the main British fleet arrived they began in turn to suffer great losses, and were obliged to retire. With the exception of these two fights and two other battles fought off the coast of South America (in the first of which a small English fleet was destroyed by the Germans, and in the second a larger British fleet took revenge), there have been no battles between the sea forces.

The big navy of England ruled the ocean. German merchant vessels were either captured or forced to remain in ports of neutral nations. German commerce was swept from the seas, while ships carrying supplies to France and the British Isles sailed unmolested—for a time. Only in the Baltic Sea was Germany mistress. Commerce from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was kept up as usual. Across the borders of Holland and Switzerland came great streams of imports. Merchants in these little countries bought, in the markets of the world, apparently for themselves, but really for Germany.

However, not for long did British commerce sail unmolested. A new and terrible menace was to appear. This was the submarine boat, the invention of Mr. John Holland, an American, but improved and enlarged by the Germans. In one of the early months of the war three British warships, the Hogue, the Cressy, and the Aboukir, were cruising about, guarding the waters of the North Sea. There was the explosion of a torpedo, and the Hogue began to sink. One of her sister ships rushed in to pick up the crew as they struggled in the water. A second torpedo struck and a second ship was sinking. Nothing daunted by the fate of the other two, the last survivor steamed to the scene of the disaster—the German submarine once more shot its deadly weapon, and three gallant ships with a thousand men had gone down.

This startled the world. It was plain that battleships and cruisers were not enough. While England controlled the surface of the sea, there was no way to prevent the coming and going of the German submarine beneath the waters. All naval warfare was changed in a moment; new methods and new weapons had to be employed.

At the outset of the war the English and French fleets had set up a strict blockade of Germany. There were certain substances which were called "contraband of war" and which, according to the law of nations, might be seized by one country if they were the property of her enemy. On the list of contraband were all kinds of ammunition and guns, as well as materials for making these. England and France, however, added to the list which all nations before the war had admitted to be contraband substances like cotton, which was very necessary in the manufacture of gun-cotton and other high explosives, gasoline—fuel for the thousands of automobiles needed to transport army supplies, and rubber for their tires. Soon other substances were added to the list.

An attempt was made to starve Germany into making peace. The central empires, in ordinary years, raise only about three-fourths of the food that they eat. With the great supply of Russian wheat shut off and vessels from North America and South America not allowed to pass the British blockade, Germany's imports had to come by way of Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries. When Holland in 1915 began to buy about four times as much wheat as she had eaten in 1913, it did not take a detective to discover that she was secretly selling to Germany the great bulk of what she was buying apparently for herself. In a like manner Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries suddenly developed a much greater appetite than before the war! The British blockade grew stricter. It was agreed to allow these countries to import just enough food for their own purposes. The British trusted that they would rather eat the food themselves than sell it to Germany even at very high prices. The Germans soon began to feel the pinch of hunger. They had slaughtered many of their cows for beef and as a result grew short of milk and butter.

To strike back at England, Germany announced that she would use her submarines to sink ships carrying food to the British Isles. This happened in February, 1915. There was a storm of protest from the world in general, but Germany agreed that her submarine commanders should warn each ship of its danger and allow the captain time to get the passengers and crew into boats before the deadly torpedo was shot. Still the crew, exposed to the danger of the ocean in open boats, and often cast loose miles from shore, were in serious danger.

The laws of nations, as observed by civilized countries in wars up to this time, have said that a blockade, in order to be recognized by all nations, had to be successful in doing the work for which it was intended. If England really was able to stop every boat sailing for German shores, then all nations would have to admit that Germany was blockaded; but if the Germans were able to sink only one ship out of every hundred that sailed into English ports, Germany could hardly be said to be carrying on a real blockade of England. In spite of protests from neutral nations who were peaceably trying to trade with all the countries at war, this sinking of merchantmen by submarines went on.

In May, 1915, the great steamship Lusitania was due to sail from New York for England. A few days before her departure notices signed by the German ambassador were put into New York papers, warning people that Germany would not be responsible for what happened to them if they took passage on this boat. Very few people paid any attention to these warnings. With over a thousand persons on board the Lusitania sailed, on schedule time. Suddenly the civilized world was horrified to hear that a German submarine, without giving the slightest warning, had sent two torpedoes crashing through the hull of the great steamer, sending her to the bottom in short order. A few had time to get into the boats, but over eight hundred men, women, and children were drowned, of whom over one hundred were American citizens. Strange as it may seem, this action caused a thrill of joy throughout Germany. Some of the Germans were horrified, as were people in neutral countries, but on the whole the action of the German navy was approved by the voice of the German people. With a curiously warped sense of right and wrong the Germans proclaimed that the English and Americans were brutal in allowing women and children to go on this boat when they had been warned that the boat was going to be sunk! They spoke of this much in the manner in which one would speak of the cruelty of a man who would drive innocent children and women to march in front of armies in order to protect the troops from the fire of their enemies.

A storm of indignation against Germany burst out all over the United States. Many were for immediate war. Calmer plans, however, prevailed, and the upshot of the matter was that a stern note was sent to Berlin notifying the Kaiser that the United States could not permit vessels carrying Americans to be torpedoed without warning on the open seas. The German papers proceeded to make jokes about this matter. They pictured every French and English boat as refusing to sail until at least two Americans had been persuaded to go as passengers, so that the boat might be under the protection of the United States.

However, in spite of Germany's solemn promise that nothing of the sort would happen again, similar incidents kept occurring, although on a smaller scale. The American steamers Falaba and Gulflight were torpedoed without warning, in each case with the loss of one or two lives. Finally, the steamer Sussex, crossing the English Channel, was hit by a torpedo which killed many of the passengers. As several Americans lost their lives, once more the United States warned Germany that this must not be repeated. Germany acknowledged that her submarine commander had gone further than his orders allowed him and promised that the act should not be repeated—provided that the United States should force England to abandon what Germany called her illegal blockade. The United States in reply made it plain that while the English blockade was unpleasant to American citizens, still it was very different from the brutal murder of women and children on the high seas. England, when convinced that an American ship was carrying supplies which would be sold in the end to Germany, merely took this vessel into an English port, where a court decided what the cargo was worth and ordered the British government to pay that sum to the (American) owners.

This was resented by the American shippers, but it was not anything to go to war over. The United States gave warning that she would hold Germany responsible for any damage to American ships or loss of American lives.

All of this time the Germans were accusing the United States of favoring the nations of the Entente because they were selling munitions of war to them and none to Germany. They said that it was grossly unfair for neutral nations to sell to one side when, owing to the blockade, they could not sell to the other also. When a protest was made by Austria, the United States pointed out that a similar case had come up in 1899. At that time the empire of Great Britain was at war with two little Dutch Republics in South Africa. The Dutch, completely blockaded, could not buy munitions in the open market. Nevertheless, this fact did not prevent both Austria and Germany from selling guns and ammunition to Great Britain. (It must be made plain that the United States government was not selling munitions of war to any of the warring nations. What Germany wanted and Austria asked was that our government should prevent our private companies, as, for example our steel mills, from shipping any goods which would eventually aid in killing Germans. The United States made it plain that our people had no feeling in the matter—that they were in business, and would sell to whomsoever came to buy; that it was not our fault that the British navy, being larger than the German, prevented Germany from trading with us.)

In the meanwhile explosions kept occurring in the many munition factories in the United States that were turning out shells and guns for the Allies. Several hundred Americans were killed in these explosions, and property to the value of millions of dollars was destroyed. It was proved that the Austrian ambassador and several of the German diplomats had been hiring men to commit these crimes. They were protected from our courts by the fact that they were representatives of foreign nations, but the President insisted that their governments recall them.

The Germans made a great point about the brutality of the English blockade. They told stories about the starving babies of Germany, who were being denied milk because of the cruelty of the English. As a matter of fact, what Germany really lacked was rubber, cotton, gasoline, and above all, nickel and cobalt, two metals which were needed in the manufacture of guns and shells.

Finally, in the summer of 1916, came a world surprise. A large German submarine, the Deutschland, made the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean and bobbed up unexpectedly in the harbor of Baltimore. In spite of all the trouble that the United States had had with Germany over the sinking of ships by submarines, the crew of this vessel was warmly received, and the cargo of dyes which she brought was eagerly purchased. The Germans, in return, loaded their ship with the metals and other products of which Germany was so short. As one American newspaper said, the Deutschland took back a cargo of nickel and rubber to the starving babies of Germany. Once more the Deutschland came, this time to New London, and again her crew was welcomed with every sign of hospitality.



In December, 1916, at the close of the victorious German campaign against Roumania, the central powers, weary of war and beginning to feel the pinch of starvation and the drain on their young men, made it known that as they had won the war they were now ready to treat for peace. This message carried with it a threat to all countries not at war that if they did not help to force the Entente to accept the Kaiser's peace terms, Germany could not be held responsible for anything that might happen to them in the future.

President Wilson, always apprehensive that something might draw the United States into the conflict, grasped eagerly at this opportunity, and in a public message he asked both sides to state to the world on what terms they would stop the war.

The Germans and their allies did not make a clear and definite proposal. On the other hand, the nations of the Entente, in no uncertain terms, declared that no peace would be made unless the central powers restored what they had wrongfully seized, paid the victims of their unprovoked attack for the damage they had done, and guaranteed that no such act should ever be committed in the future. They also declared that the Poles, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Alsatians, and Serbs should be freed from the tyrannous governments which now enslaved them. In plain language this meant that the central powers must give back part of Schleswig to Denmark, allow the kingdom of Poland to be restored as it once had been; permit the Bohemians and Slovaks to form an independent nation in the midst of Austria-Hungary; allow the people of Alsace and Lorraine the right of returning to France; annex the Italians in Austria-Hungary to Italy, and permit the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina to join their cousins to the southeast in one great Serbian nation.

When these terms were published the German government exclaimed that while they had been willing to make peace and perhaps even give back the conquered portions of Belgium and northern France in return for the captured German colonies in Africa and the Pacific Ocean, with the payment of indemnities to Germany, now it was plain that the nations of the Entente intended to wipe out utterly the German nation and dismember the empire of Austria-Hungary; and that since Germany had offered her enemies an honorable peace and they had refused, the only thing left for the central powers to do was to fight to the bitter end and use any means whatsoever to force their enemies to make peace.

In other words, here were the two conflicting claims: Germany said, "We have won the war. Don't you recognize the fact that you have been beaten? Give us back our colonies, organize a kingdom of Poland, out of the part of Russian Poland which we have conquered, as a separate kingdom under our protection, but don't expect us to join to this any part of Austrian or Prussian Poland. (Prussian and Austrian Poland are ours. You wouldn't expect us to give up any part of them, would you?) Allow us to keep the port of Antwerp and maintain our control over the Balkan peninsula. We will restore to you northern France, most of Belgium, and even part of Serbia. See what a generous offer we are making!"

The Allied nations replied, in effect: "You now have gotten three-fourths of what you aimed at when you began the war. If we make peace now, allowing you to keep the greater part of what you have conquered, you will be magnanimous and give back a small portion of it if we in turn surrender all your lost colonies. Hardly! We demand, on the other hand, that you recompense, as far as you can, the miserable victims of your savage attack for the death and destruction that you have caused; that you put things back as you found them as nearly as possible; that you make it plain to us that never again will we have to be on guard against the possibility of a ruthless invasion by your army; that you give to the peoples whom you and your allies have forcibly annexed or retained under your rule a chance to choose their own form of government."

Then said the Germans to the world, "You see! They want to wipe us out of existence and cut the empire of our allies into small bits. Nothing is left but to fight for our existence, and, as we are fighting for our existence, all rules hitherto observed in civilized warfare are now called off!"

In the latter part of January, 1917, the German government announced that, inasmuch as they had tried to bring about an honorable peace (which would have left them still in possession of three-fourths the plunder they had gained in the war) and this peace offer had been rejected by the Entente, all responsibility for anything which might happen hereafter in the war would have to be borne by France, England, etc., and not by Germany. It was stated that Germany was fighting for her existence, and that when one's life is at stake all methods of fighting are permissible. Germany proposed, therefore, to send out her submarines and sink without warning all merchant ships sailing toward English or French ports.

In a special note to the United States, the German government said that once a week, at a certain time, the United States would be permitted to send a passenger vessel to England, provided that this boat were duly inspected and proved to have no munitions of war or supplies for England on board. It must be painted all over with red, white, and blue stripes and must be marked in other ways so that the German submarine commanders would know it. (It must be remembered that Germany insisted that she was fighting for the freedom of the seas!)

Now, at all times, it has been recognized that the open seas are free to all nations for travel and commerce. This proposal, to sink without warning all ships on the ocean, was a bit of effrontery that few had imagined even the German government was capable of.

President Wilson had been exceedingly patient with Germany. In fact, a great majority of the newspaper and magazine writers in the country had criticized him for being too patient. The great majority of the people of the United States were for peace, ardently. The government at Washington knew this. Nevertheless, this last announcement by Germany that she proposed to kill any American citizens who dared to travel on the sea in the neighborhood of England and France seemed more than a self-respecting nation could endure. The Secretary of State sent notice to Count Von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, to leave this country. Friendly relations between the imperial government of Germany and the United States of America were at an end.

Questions for Review

1. How did the submarine boat change methods of warfare? 2. What is contraband of war? 3. Was it right to prevent the importation of food into Germany? 4. Why would a nation which manufactured a great deal of war material object to the sale of such material to fighting nations by nations at peace? 5. Show how this rule, if carried out, would have a tendency to make all nations devote too much work to the preparation of war supplies. 6. Show the difference between the British blockade and the sinking of ships by German submarines. 7. Would the blowing up of American factories by paid agents of the German government have been a good enough reason for the United States to have declared war? 8. How did the voyages of the Deutschland prove that the United States wanted to be fair to both sides in the war? 9. What reasons had Austria and Germany for wishing peace in December 1916? 10. Why did President Wilson ask the warring nations to state their aims in the war? 11. How did Germany try to justify the sinking of ships without warning?



CHAPTER XXII

Another Crown Topples

The unnatural alliance of the Czar and the free peoples.—The first Duma and the revolt of 1905.—The Zemptsvos and the people against the pro-German officials.—The death of Rasputin and other signs of unrest.—The revolution of March 1917.—The Czar becomes Mr. Romanoff.—Four different governments within eight months.—Civil war and a German effort for peace.

It will be recalled that the great war was caused in the first place by the unprovoked attack of Austria on Serbia and the unwillingness of Russia to stand by and see her little neighbor crushed, and that England came in to make good her word, pledged to Belgium, to defend that small country from all hostile attacks. Thus the nations of the Entente posed before the world as the defenders of small nations and as champions of the rights of peoples to live under the form of government which they might choose. You will remember that when the central powers said that they were ready to talk peace terms the nations of the Entente replied that there could be no peace as long as the Danes, Poles, and Alsatians were forcibly held by Germany in her empire and as long as Austria denied the Ruthenians, Roumanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, and Italians in their empire the right either to rule themselves or to join the nations united to them by ties of blood and language. France and Great Britain especially were fond of saying that it was a war of the free peoples against those enslaved by military rule—a conflict between self-governed nations and those which were oppressing their foreign subjects. Replying to this the central powers would always point to Russia. Russia, said they, oppressed the Poles and Lithuanians, the Letts, the Esthonians, the Finns. She, as well as Austria-Hungary, has hundreds of thousands of Roumanians within her territories. Her people had even less political freedom than the inhabitants of Austria and Germany.

The nations of the Entente did not reply to these charges of the Germans. There was no reply to make; it was the truth. In fact there is no doubt that French and British statesmen were afraid of a Russian victory. They did not want the war to be won by the one nation in their group which had a despotic form of government. On the other hand the high officials in Russia were not any too happy at the thought of their alliance with the free peoples of western Europe. Germany was much more their ideal of a country governed in the proper manner than was France. As you have been told, many of the nobles of the Russian court were of German blood and secretly desired the victory of their fatherland, while many Russians of the party who wanted to keep all power out of the hands of the common people were afraid of seeing Germany crushed, for fear their own people would rise up and demand more liberty.

You will recall that there had been unrest in Russia at the time of the outbreak of the war; that strikes and labor troubles were threatened, so that many people thought the Czar had not been at all sorry to see the war break out, in order to turn the minds of his people away from their own wrongs.

At the close of the disastrous war with the Japanese in 1905, the cry from the Russian people for a Congress, or some form of elective government, had been so strong that the Czar had to give in. So he called the first Duma. This body of men, as has been explained, could talk and could complain, but could pass no laws. The first Duma had had so many grievances and had talked so bitterly against the government, that it had been forced to break up, and Cossack troops were called in to put down riots among the people at St. Petersburg, which they did with great ferocity. All this time there had been growing, among the Russian people, a feeling that they were being robbed and betrayed by the grand dukes and high nobles. They distrusted the court. They felt that the Czar was well-meaning, but weak, and that he was a mere puppet in the hands of his German wife, his cousins the grand dukes, and above all a notorious monk, called Rasputin. This strange man, a son of the common people, had risen to great power in the court. He had persuaded the Empress that he alone could keep health and strength in the frail body of the crown prince, the Czarevitch, and to keep up this delusion he had bribed one of the ladies in waiting to pour a mild poison into the boy's food whenever Rasputin was away from the court for more than a few days. The poor little prince, of course, was made sick; whereupon, the Empress would hurriedly send for Rasputin, upon whose arrival the Czarevitch "miraculously" got well. In this manner this low-born fakir obtained such a hold over the Czar and Czarina that he was able to appoint governors of states, put bishops out of their places, and even change prime ministers. There is no doubt that the Germans bribed him to use his influence in their behalf. It is a sad illustration of the ignorance of the Russian people as a whole, that such a man could have gotten so great a power on such flimsy pretenses.

The real salvation of the Russians came through the Zemptsvos. These were little assemblies, one in each county in Russia, elected by the people to decide all local matters, like the building of roads, helping feed the poor, etc. They had been started by Czar Alexander II, in 1862. Although the court was rotten with graft and plotting, the Zemptsvos remained true to the people. They finally all united in a big confederation, and when the world war broke out, this body, really the only patriotic part of the Russian government, kept the grand dukes and the pro-Germans from betraying the nation into the hands of the enemy.

It was a strange situation. The Russian people through the representatives that they elected to these little county assemblies were patriotically carrying out the war, while the grand dukes and the court nobles, who had gotten Russia into this trouble, were, for the most part, hampering the soldiers, either through grafting off the supplies and speculating in food, or traitorously plotting to betray their country to the Germans. With plenty of food in Russia, with millions of bushels of grain stored away by men who were holding it in order to get still higher prices, there was not enough for the people of Petrograd to eat.

As you were told in a previous chapter, the German, Sturmer, was made prime minister, probably with the approval of the monk, Rasputin. Roumania, depending on promises of Russian help, was crushed between the armies of the Germans on the one side and the Turks and Bulgars on the other, while trainload after trainload of the guns and munitions which would have enabled her armies to stand firm was sidetracked and delayed on Russian railroads. "Your Majesty, we are betrayed," said the French general who had been sent by the western allies to direct the army of the king of Roumania, when his pleas for ammunition were ignored and promise after promise made him by the Russian prime minister was broken.

Of all the countries in Europe, with the possible exception of Turkey, Russia had been the most ignorant. The great mass of the people had had no schooling and were unable to read and write. It was easier for the grand dukes and nobles to keep down the peasants and to remain undisturbed in the ownership of their great estates if the people knew nothing more than to labor and suffer in silence. There was a class of Russians, however, the most patriotic and the best educated men in the state, who were working quietly, but actively, to make conditions better. Then too, the Nihilists, anarchists who had been working (often by throwing bombs) for the overthrow of the Czar, had spread their teachings throughout the country. Students of the universities, writers, musicians, and artists, had preached the doctrines of the rights of man. While outwardly the government appeared as strong as ever, really it was like a tree whose trunk has rotted through and through, and which needs only one vigorous push to send it crashing to the ground.

It is generally in large cities that protests against the government are begun. For one thing, it is harder, in a great mob of people, to pick out the ones who are responsible for starting the trouble. Then again it is natural for people to make their protests in capital cities where the government cannot fail to hear them. A third reason lies in the fact that in large cities there are always a great number of persons who are poor and who are the first ones to feel the pinch of starvation, when hard times arise or when speculators seize upon food with the idea of causing the prices to rise. Starvation makes these people desperate—they do not care whether they live or not—and, as a result, they dare to oppose themselves to the police and the soldiers.

There had been murmurs of discontent in Petrograd for a long time. This was felt not only among the common people, but also among the more patriotic of the upper classes. In the course of the winter of 1916-17, the monk, Rasputin, as a result of a plot, was invited to the home of a grand duke, a cousin of the Czar. There a young prince, determined to free Russia of this pest, shot him to death and his body was thrown upon the ice of the frozen Neva.

About this time the lack of food in Petrograd, the result largely of speculation and "cornering the market," had become so serious that the government thought it wise to call in several regiments of Cossacks to reinforce the police.

These Cossacks are wild tribesmen of the plains who enjoy a freedom not shared by any other class in Russia. They are warriors by trade and their sole duty consists in offering themselves, fully equipped, whenever the government has need of their services in war. They were of a different race, originally, than the Russians themselves, although by inter-marrying they now have some Slavic blood in their veins. Their appearance upon the streets of Petrograd was almost always a threat to the people. Enjoying freedom themselves and liking nothing better than the practice of their trade—fighting—they had had little or no sympathy with the wrongs of the populace, and so were the strongest supporters of the despotic rule of the Czar. At times when the Czar did not dare to trust his regular soldiers to enforce order in Petrograd or Moscow, for fear the men would refuse to fire upon their own relatives in the mob, the Cossacks could always be counted upon to ride their horses fearlessly through the people, sabering to right and left those who refused to disperse.



The second week of March, 1917, found crowds in Petrograd protesting against the high prices of food and forming in long lines to demand grain of the government. As day succeeded day, the crowds grew larger and bolder in their murmurings. Cossacks were sent into the city, but for some strange reason they did not cause fear as they had in times past. Their manner was different. Instead of drawing their sabers, they good naturedly joked with the people as they rode among them to disperse the mobs, and were actually cheered at times by the populace. The crowds grew larger and more boisterous. Regiment after regiment of troops was called in. The police fired upon the people when the latter refused to go home. Then a strange thing happened. A Cossack, his eyes flashing fire, rode at full tilt up the street toward a policeman who was firing on the mob, and shot him dead on the spot. A shout went up from the people: "The Cossacks are with us!" New regiments of troops were brought in. The men who composed them knew that they were going to be ordered to fire upon their own kind of people—their own kin perhaps, whose only crime was that they were hungry and had dared to say so. One regiment turned upon its officers, refusing to obey them, and made them prisoners. Another and another joined the revolting forces. It was like the scenes in Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. The people had gathered to protest, and, hardly knowing what they did, they had turned their protests into a revolution. Regiments loyal to the Czar were hastily summoned to fire upon their revolting comrades. They hesitated. Leaders of the mob rushed over to them, pleading with them not to fire. A few scattering volleys were followed by a lull, and, then with a shout of joy, the troops last remaining loyal threw down their arms and rushed across to embrace the revolutionists. At a great meeting of the mob a group of soldiers and working men was picked out to call upon the Duma and ask this body to form a temporary government. Another group was appointed to wait upon Nicholas II and tell him that henceforth he was not the Czar of all the Russias, but plain Nicholas Romanoff. Messengers were sent to the fighting fronts to inform the generals that they were no longer to take orders from the Czar, but from the representatives of the free people of Russia. With remarkable calmness, the nation accepted the new situation. Within two days a new government had been formed, composed of some of the best men in the great empire. The Czar signed a paper giving up the throne in behalf of himself and his young son and nominating his brother Michael to take his place. Michael, however, was too wise. He notified the people that he would accept the crown only if they should vote to give it to him; and this the people would not do.



The government, as formed at first, with its ministers of different departments like the American cabinet, was composed of citizens of the middle classes—lawyers, professors of the universities, land-owners, merchants were represented—and at the head of the ministry was a prince. This arrangement did not satisfy the rabble. The radical socialists, most of whom owned no property and wanted all wealth divided up among all the people, were not much happier to be ruled by the moderately well-to-do than they were to submit to the rule of the nobles. The council of workingmen and soldiers, meeting in the great hall which had formerly housed the Duma, began to take upon themselves the powers of government. Someone proclaimed that now the Russian people should have peace, and when Prof. Milioukoff, foreign minister for the new government, assured France and England that Russia would stick by them to the last, a howling crowd of workingmen threatened to mob him. "No annexations and no indemnities," was the cry of the socialists. "Let us go back to conditions as they were before the war. Let each nation bear the burden of its own losses and let us have peace." After a stormy session, the new government agreed to include in its numbers several representatives of the soldiers and workingmen. Prof. Milioukoff resigned and Alexander Kerensky, a radical young lawyer, became the real leader of the Russian government.



Germany and Austria, meanwhile, had eagerly seized the advantage offered by Russia's internal troubles. Their troops were ordered to make friends with the Russians in the trenches opposite. They played eagerly upon the new Russian feeling of the brotherhood of man and freedom and equality, to do away with fighting on the east, thus being able to transfer to the western front some of their best regiments. As a result the French and English, after driving the Germans back for many miles in northern France were at last brought to a standstill. The burden of carrying the whole war seemed about to fall more heavily than ever upon the armies in the west. Talk of a separate peace between Russia and the central powers grew stronger and stronger. The Russian troops felt that they had been fighting the battles of the Czar and the grand dukes and they saw no reason why they should go on shooting their brother workingmen in Germany.

At this point Kerensky, who had been made minister of war, set out to visit the armies in the field. Arriving at the battle grounds of eastern Galicia he made rousing speeches to the soldiers and actually led them in person toward the German trenches. The result was a vigorous attack all along the line under Generals Brusiloff and Korniloff which swept the Germans and Austrians back for many miles, and threatened for a time to recapture Lemberg. German spies, however, and agents of the peace party were busy among the Russian soldiers. They soon persuaded a certain division to stop fighting and retreat. The movement to the rear, begun by these troops, carried others with it, and for a time it seemed as though the whole Russian army was going to pieces. Ammunition was not supplied to the soldiers. The situation was serious and called for a strong hand. Kerensky was made prime minister and the members of the government and the council of workingmen and soldiers voted him almost the powers of a Czar. He was authorized to give orders that any deserters or traitors be shot, if need be, without trial. Under his rule the Russian army began to re-form, and the situation improved.

In November, 1917, a faction of the extreme Socialists called the Bolsheviki (Bol-she-vi'ki) won over the garrisons of Petrograd and Moscow, seized control of the government, forcing Kerensky to flee, and threatened to make peace with Germany. These people are, for the most part, the poor citizens of large cities. They have few followers outside of the city population, for the average Russian in the country is a land owner, and he does not take kindly to the idea of losing his property or dividing it with some landless beggar from Petrograd.

The revolt of the Bolsheviki, then, simply added to the confusion in the realm of Russia. That unhappy country was torn apart by the fights of the different factions. Finland demanded its independence, and German spies and agents encouraged the Ruthenians living in a great province called the Ukraine, to do the same. The Cossacks withdrew to the country to the north of the Crimean peninsula, and the only Russian armies that kept on fighting were those in Turkey. These forces had been gathered largely from the states between the Black and Caspian Seas. Having suffered persecution in the old days, they had hated the Turks for ages and needed no orders from Petrograd to induce them to take revenge.

Finally the Bolshevik government agreed to a peace with the central powers which gave Germany and Austria everything that they wanted. The Russian armies were disbanded and the Germans and Austrians were free to turn their fighting men back to the western front. In the meantime, the Ruthenian republic, now called the Ukraine, was allowed by the Bolsheviki to make a separate peace with Germany and Austria. The troops of the Germans and Austrians began joyously to pillage both Russia and the Ukraine, hunting for the food that was so scarce in the central empires. However, for a whole year hardly anybody in Russia had been willing to do a stroke of work. The fields had gone untilled while the peasants, drunk with their new freedom, and without a care for the morrow, lived off the grain that had been saved up during the past years. As a result, whatever grain the enemy found proved spoiled and mouldy, hardly fit to feed to hogs. As the Germans went about, taking anything that they wished and as food grew scarce, the unrest in Russia grew greater.

The Bolshevik government had not set up a democracy—a government where all the people had equal rights: they had set up a tyranny of the lower classes. The small land owners, the tradesmen, the middle classes were not allowed any voice in the government. When the first National Assembly or Congress was elected and called together, the Bolsheviki finding that they did not control a majority of its members, disbanded it by force.

Little by little people began to oppose this rule. They objected to being robbed of their rights by the rabble just as much as by the Czar.

When the Russian armies were disbanded, there were some troops that refused to throw down their arms. Among them were the regiments of Czecho-Slovaks. These men had been forced, against their will, to serve in the Austrian army. They were from the northern part of the Austrian empire, Bohemia and Moravia. They were Slavs, related to the Russians, speaking a language very much like Russian, hating the Germans of Austria and anxious to free their country from the empire of the Hapsburgs. When General Brusiloff made his big attack in June, 1916, these men had deserted the Austrian army and re-enlisted as Russians. They could not get back to Austria for the Austrians would shoot them as deserters. Of course, the Austrian and the German generals would make no peace with them. Therefore, this army, 200,000 strong, kept their own officers and their order and their arms and refused to have anything to do with the cowardly peace made by the Bolsheviki. Several thousand of them made their way across Siberia, across the Pacific Ocean, across America, across the Atlantic to France and Italy, where they are fighting by the thousands in the armies of the Entente. The main body of them, however, are still in Russia (August 1, 1918), holding the great Siberian railway, fully ready to renew the war against the central powers at any time when the patriotic Russians will rise and help them. The problem of how to get aid to the Czechs without angering the Russian people is a big one for the allied statesmen.

The trouble with the Russians is that they are not educated; the result of this is that they readily believe the lies of spies and tricksters, that would never deceive an educated man.

Questions for Review

1. Was the Russian government as harsh as that of Germany? 2. Why was Russia a source of weakness to the Entente? 3. Why was Rasputin killed? 4. Why did the Czars prefer the Cossacks? 5. What classes fought after the Czar's downfall? 6. How did the central powers take advantage of Russia's troubles? 7. How did the peace with the Bolsheviki help Germany? 8. Explain where the Czecho-Slovak army came from.



CHAPTER XXIII

The United States at War—Why?

Germany throws to the winds all rules of civilized war.—Dr. Zimmermann's famous note.—Congress declares war.—Other nations follow our example.—The plight of Holland, Denmark, and Norway.—German arguments for submarine warfare shown to be groundless.—German agents blow up American factories.—German threats against the United States.—Germany and the Monroe Doctrine.—A government whose deeds its people cannot question.—Why American troops were sent to Europe.—Why the war lords wanted peace in January, 1918.

In the meantime, two months had elapsed from the time when the German ambassador, Count Von Bernstorff, had been sent home by the United States. The Germans, true to their word, had begun their campaign of attacking and sinking without warning ships of all kinds in the waters surrounding Great Britain and France. Even the hospital ships, marked plainly with the red cross, and boats carrying food to the starving people of Belgium, were torpedoed without mercy. The curious state of public feeling in Germany is well illustrated by an incident which happened at this time. It so happened that an English hospital ship, crossing the channel, was laden with about as many German wounded as British. These men had been left helpless on the field of battle after the Germans had retreated, and had been picked up and cared for by the British, along with their own troops. A German submarine with its deadly torpedo sent this vessel to the bottom. The wounded men, German and British alike, sank without the slightest chance for their lives. A burst of indignation came from all over Germany against the "unspeakable brutality" of the British who dared to expose German wounded men to the danger of travel on the open sea! The British were warned that if this happened again the Germans would make reprisals upon British prisoners in their hands.



Week followed week and still there was no declaration of war between the United States and Germany. But in the latter part of February, the United States government made public a note which its secret agents had stopped from being delivered to the German ambassador in Mexico. It was signed by Dr. Zimmermann, German minister of foreign affairs, and it requested the ambassador as soon as it was certain that there would be an outbreak of war with the United States as a result of the sinking of ships without warning, to propose to Mexico that she ally herself with Germany. "Together we will make war on the United States," said Dr. Zimmermann, "and together we will make peace. Mexico will receive as her reward her lost provinces of Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico." "Ask the Mexican government," said Dr. Zimmermann, "to propose to the Japanese that Japan break away from her alliance with England and join Mexico and Germany in an attack upon the United States."

The publication of this note made a tremendous change in feeling in the United States. Up to this time a great portion of the people had felt that perhaps we were hasty in breaking off relations with Germany, and in their earnest desire for peace had been willing to put up with injury and even insults on the part of the Germans, excusing them on the grounds of their military necessity. The publication of Dr. Zimmermann's note, however, showed the people of the United States the true temper of the government at Berlin. It showed them that the German war lords had no respect for anything but brute force, that the language of cannon was the only language which they could understand, and that any further patience on the part of this country would be looked upon as weakness and treated with scorn and contempt.

On the sixth of April, 1917, Congress, called into session by the President, by an overwhelming vote declared that a state of war existed between the United States of America and the Imperial Government of Germany.

At this point it may be well to sum up the causes that brought the United States into the great war. These causes may be given under two heads: (1) the war waged upon us by submarines; and (2) the German plots and threats against our country at a time when we were at peace with them. The latter, as given in pages to follow, comprise: (a) The Kaiser's threat, (b) Admiral Von Tirpitz's threat, (c) the blowing up of American factories and death of American workingmen, (d) the attempt to get us into war with Japan and Mexico, and (e) the spending of the German government's money in an attempt to make our congressmen vote as Germany wished.



The Submarine War

Up to the time when the United States declared war, two hundred and twenty-six Americans, men, women, and infants, had met their death through the sinking of ships, torpedoed without warning, under orders of the German government. These people were peaceable travelers, going about their business on the high seas in passenger steamers owned by private companies. According to the law observed by all nations up to this time there was no more reason for them to fear danger from the Germans than if they had been traveling on trains in South America or Spain, or any other country not at war. The attack upon these ships, to say nothing about the brutal and inhuman method of sinking them without warning, was an act of war on the part of Germany against any country whose citizens happened to be traveling on these ocean steamers. That the action of the United States in calling the submarine attacks an act of war was only justice is proved by the fact that several other nations, who had nothing to gain by going to war and had earnestly desired to remain neutral, took the same stand. Brazil, Cuba, and several other South and Central American republics found that they could not maintain their honor without declaring war on Germany. German ambassadors and ministers have been dismissed from practically every capital in Spanish America.

In Europe, also, neutral nations like Holland, Denmark, and Norway saw their ships sunk and their citizens drowned. In spite of their wrongs, however, the first two did not dare to declare war on Germany, as the Germans would be able to throw a strong army across the border and overrun each of these two little countries before the allies could come to their help. With the fate of Belgium and Serbia before them, the Danes and the Dutch swallowed their pride and sat helplessly by while Germany killed their sailors and defenseless passengers. After the failure of the Entente to protect Serbia and Roumania, no one could blame Denmark and Holland.

Norway, too, was exposed to danger of a raid by the German fleet. Commanding the Skager Rack and Cattegat as they did, with the Kiel Canal connecting them, the Germans could bombard the cities on the Norwegian coast or even land an army to invade the country. The three little countries together do not have an army any larger than that of Roumania, and it would have been out of the question for them to declare war on Germany without seeing their whole territory overrun and laid waste.

Nevertheless public opinion in Norway was so strong against Germany that the Norwegian government, on November first, 1917 sent a vigorous protest to Berlin, closing with these words:

"The Norwegian government will not again state its views, as it has already done so on several occasions, as to the violation of the principles of the freedom of the high seas incurred by the proclamation of large tracts of the ocean as a war zone and by the sinking of neutral merchant ships not carrying contraband.

"It has made a profound impression on the Norwegian people that not only have German submarines continued to sink peaceful neutral merchant ships, paying no attention to the fate of their crews, but that even German warships adopted the same tactics. The Norwegian government decided to send this note in order to bring to the attention of the German government the impression these acts have made upon the Norwegian people."

The two arguments that the Germans used in trying to justify themselves for their inhuman methods with the submarine are: (1) that on these ships which were sunk were supplies for the French and British armies, the arrival of which would aid them in killing Germans, and (2) that the English, by their blockade of Germany, were doing something which was contrary to the laws of nations and starving German women and children, and, therefore, since England was breaking some rules of the war game, Germany had the right to go ahead and break others.

The trade of the United States in selling war supplies to France and England was a sore spot with Germany. They claimed that the United States was unfair in selling to the Entente and not to them. Of course, this was foolish, as has been pointed out, for the United States was just as ready to sell to Germany as to the Allies, as was shown by the two voyages of the Deutschland. If our government had forbidden our people to sell war supplies at all, and if other neutral countries had done the same thing, then the result would be that all wars would be won by the country which made the biggest preparation for war in times of peace. A law passed by neutral countries forbidding their merchants from selling munitions would leave a non-military nation, which had not been getting ready for war, absolutely at the mercy of a neighbor who for years had been storing up shells and guns for the purpose of unrighteous conquest. So clear was this right to sell munitions that Germany did not dare protest, but ordered Austria to do so instead. In reply, our government was able to point out cases where Austrian firms had sold guns, etc., to Great Britain during the Boer War as you have already been told, and Austria had no answer to give.

What is more, at all of the meetings of the diplomats of different nations at the Hague, called for the purpose of trying to prevent future wars, if possible, or at least to make them more humane and less brutal to the women and children and others who were not actually fighting, Germany had always upheld the right of neutral nations to sell arms. Moreover, her representatives had fought strongly against any proposals to settle disputes by arbitration and peaceful agreements. At a time when many European nations signed treaties with the United States agreeing to allow one year to elapse between a dispute which might lead to war and the actual declaring of war itself, Germany positively refused to consider such an agreement.

As for the English blockade, England was doing no more to Germany than Germany or any other country would have done to England if the English navy had not been so strong. In our own Civil War the North kept up a like blockade of the South and no nation protested against it, for it was recognized as an entirely legal act. In the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, the Germans were blockading the city of Paris and the country around it. The Frenchmen tried to send their women and children outside the lines to be fed. The Germans drove them back at the point of the bayonet, and told them that they might "fry in their own fat." According to the laws of war they were perfectly justified in what they did. Then, too, the English blockade, which stopped ships which were found to be loaded with supplies for Germany and took them peaceably to an English port, where it was decided how much the owners should be paid for the cargoes, was a very different matter from the brutal drowning of helpless men, women, and children by the German submarines. In one case, owners of the goods were caused a great deal of annoyance and in some instances did not get their money promptly. On the other side, there was murder of the most fiendish kind, an act of war against neutral states.

Plots and Threats Against the United States



Let us turn now to the second cause for grievance that the United States had against Germany. At a time when American citizens who sympathized with Germany were subscribing millions of dollars for the relief of the German wounded, it is strongly suspected that this was the very money, which, collected by the German government's own agents, was being spent in plots involving the destroying of the property of some American citizens and the death of others. The German ambassador and his helpers were hiring men to blow up American factories, to destroy railroad bridges, and to kill Americans who were making war supplies for the armies of Europe. Factory after factory was blown up with considerable loss of life. Bombs, with clock work attachment to explode them at a certain time, were found on ships sailing for Europe. Money was poured out in great quantities to influence members of the United States Congress to vote against the shipment of war supplies to France and England. Revolts paid for by German money were organized in Mexico and the Islands of the West Indies. For a long time there had been a series of stories and newspaper and magazine articles trying to prove to the American people that Japan was planning to make war on us. The same sort of stories appeared in Japan, persuading the Japanese that they were in danger of being attacked by the United States. It now appears that the great part of these stories were started by the Germans, who hoped to get us into a war with Japan and profit by the ill will which must follow between the two countries.

At first, Americans were inclined to think that all of these things could be traced to German-Americans, whose zeal for their Fatherland caused them to go too far. But it has been proved beyond a doubt that all of these acts, which were really acts of war against the United States, were ordered by the government at Berlin and paid for by German money, or by American money which had been contributed for the benefit of the German Red Cross service.

In addition to these facts there were threats against the United States which could not be ignored. The Kaiser had told our ambassador at Berlin, Mr. Gerard, that "America had better beware after this war" for he "would stand no nonsense from her." Admiral Von Tirpitz, the German Secretary of the Navy, also told Mr. Gerard that Germany needed the coast of Belgium as a place from which to start her "future war on England and America."

American statesmen were seriously concerned at threats of this kind, for they knew that the government in power at Berlin could absolutely command its people, and by forbidding certain kinds of news and substituting other things in the German newspapers could make the German people think anything which the war lords wished them to think. Thus there was great danger that, having won the war from the Entente or having stood them off successfully until the fight was declared a draw, Germany would next attack the United States with the idea of collecting from this comparatively defenseless and very rich country the huge indemnity which she had planned to assess upon France and Russia. With this money and with the breaking down of the Monroe Doctrine, Germany could set up a great empire in South America which would make her almost as powerful as she would have been had her first plans for crushing France and Russia been successful.

You will recall, from your study of United States history, that President Monroe had warned European governments to keep their hands off South America, for the United States would act as big brother to any of the little republics there who might be attacked by a European foe. Germany in recent years has resented this very vigorously. There were nearly half a million Germans in the southern part of Brazil. Uruguay and the Argentine Republic also had large German settlements. If the Monroe Doctrine were out of the way, Germany hoped that she would be able to get a footing in these countries in which she had colonists and gradually to gain control of the entire country. In the fall of 1917 there was uncovered a plot among the German residents of certain states in the southern part of Brazil to make this territory a part of the German Colonial Empire. This discovery, along with the sinking of Brazilian ships by submarines, drove Brazil into war with Germany.

To sum up: The United States entered the war: first, because German submarines were killing her peaceful citizens and stopping her lawful trade; second, because paid agents of the German government were destroying American property in the United States, killing American citizens, and creating discord in our political life; they were pretending to be friendly and yet were trying to enlist Japan and Mexico in war against us; third, for the reason that because of Germany's threats and her well-known policy in South America there was grave danger that it would be our turn next if the central powers should come out of the European war uncrushed.

The American government has made it plain that we are not moved by any desire for gain for ourselves. We have nothing to win through the war except the assurance that our nation will be safe. If Germany had a government which the people controlled, then the United States could trust promises of that government. But, as President Wilson has pointed out, no one can trust the present government of Germany, for it is responsible to no one for what it does. It has torn up sacred promises, which its Chancellor called "scraps of paper"; it has broken its word; it has ordered "acts of frightfulness" in the lands which it has conquered and on the high seas, with the idea of brutally forcing its will upon enemies and neutral countries alike. It has deceived its own people, persuading them that they were attacked by France and Russia, while all the time it was plotting to rule the world through force of arms.

President Wilson has said that the object of the United States in this war is "to make the world safe for democracy." This means that a free people, who have no desire to interfere with any of their neighbors or to make conquests by force of arms, shall be allowed to live their lives without preparation for war and without fear that they may be attacked by a nation with military rulers.

We have seen how France, attacked in 1870 and threatened by Germany in 1875, 1905, of war and 1911 was obliged to match gun for gun and ship for ship with her warlike neighbor to the east. The dread of an attack by the military party of Germany hung over France like a shadow throughout forty-three years of a peace which was only a little better than war, because of the vast amount of money that had to be spent and the attention that had to be given to preparation for the war that all felt would one day come.

When once the German people have a controlling voice in the government, then, and not till then, can other governments believe the word of the statesmen at Berlin. But at present the citizens of Germany have little real power. For, while they can elect members of the Reichstag, the Reichstag can pass no laws, for above this body is the national council, whose members are appointed by the Kaiser and the other kings and grand dukes. The power of declaring war and making peace lies practically in the hands of the Kaiser alone, and at any moment he can set aside any of Germany's laws, under the plea that "military necessity" calls for certain things to be done. In this way, he has thrown into prison those who dared to speak against the war, and has either suppressed newspapers or ordered them to print only what he wished printed; thus the German people have let him do their thinking for them.

They are a docile people. One of the first words that a German baby is taught to say is "Kaiser," and all of the schools, which are run by the government, have taught nothing but respect for the present form of government, and almost a worship of the Kaiser himself. What it is hoped that this war will bring about is the freeing of the German people from their blind obedience to the military power, which for its own glory and pride has hurled them by the millions to death.

The United States has adopted plans in this war which are very different from any hitherto used. With the exception of some troops raised for a few months during the dark days of the War of the Rebellion, all of our armies have been recruited from men who enlisted of their own free will. In this great conflict in which we are now engaged, the government has drawn its soldiers by lot from a list of all the young men in the country between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. Thus, rich and poor alike are fighting in our ranks.

For the first time in our history our troops have been sent to fight on another continent. Many persons have felt that we should keep our young men at home and wait for Germany to cross the Atlantic in order to attack us. Our statesmen, on the other hand, saw that the peace of the world was at stake. If Germany, Austria, and Turkey, the three countries whose people have no voice in the question of peace or war, come out of this conflict victorious, or even undefeated, the world will see again the mad race for armaments which resulted in the war of 1914. If, on the other hand, the people of these nations realize that it is true today, as in the olden times, that those people who take up the sword shall perish by the sword, they will overthrow their leaders and agree to disarm and live at peace in future with their neighbors.

The military parties in Austria and Germany wanted war. The only way by which these people can be convinced is by brute force. When they realize that they have not gained by war, but have lost, not only a great deal of their wealth, through the terrific cost of the war, but the friendship and respect of the whole world, when they realize that the nations allied against them will push the war relentlessly until these military chiefs confess that they never want to hear the word "war" again, then, and only then, will they be ready to throw down their arms and agree to join a league of the nations whose object shall be to prevent any future wars.

As long as Germany was victorious and her people thought that they were going to come out of the conflict with added territory and big money indemnities, war was popular. But with the flower of their young men slain, and the prospect of conquest and plunder growing smaller and smaller with each passing month, the Germans, too, are beginning to hate the thought of war.

The American army can give the finishing touch to the German downfall along the western front, and the sooner the Germans realize that they cannot win from the rapidly growing number of their enemies, the sooner will come the the end of this greatest tragedy in the civilized world.

The war lords knew that if the war lasted long enough they must be defeated and they were striving hard all through the years 1916 and 1917 to make peace while they had possession of enough of the enemy's lands so that they could show their own people some gain in territory to pay them back for their terrible sufferings. The German war debt was so great that the war lords dreaded to face their own people after the latter realized that they had been deceived as well as defeated. The government had told them (1) that England, France, and Russia forced this war upon Germany, (2) that the German armies would win the war in short order, and (3) that a huge sum of money would be collected from France, Belgium, and Russia to pay the expenses of the war. The war lords dreaded to think of the time when their people, knowing that they themselves will have to bear the fearful burden of war debt, learned also that the whole tragedy was forced upon the world by the pride and ambition of their own leaders. By Christmas 1917, the Kaiser was once more hinting that Germany was ready to talk peace. He was wise, for if peace could have been made then it would have left Germany absolute mistress of all of middle Europe. Austria, Bulgaria, and Turkey were more under the control of the Kaiser and his war lords than were parts of his own empire like Bavaria and Saxony. In Belgium, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania, Roumania, and northern France the central powers had over forty millions of people who were compelled to work for them like slaves. The plunder collected from these countries ran into billions of dollars. The road to the east, cut asunder by the results of the second Balkan war (see map), had been forced open by the rush of the victorious German armies through Serbia and Roumania. A peace at this time would have been a German victory. With the drain on the man power of the central powers, with dissatisfaction growing among their people, with the steady increase in the armies of the United States, time was fighting on the side of the allies.

Questions for Review

1. Does the Zimmermann note show that the German government understood conditions in Mexico and the United States? 2. Why did the Zimmermann note have so strong an effect upon American public opinion? 3. What were the steps by which the United States was forced into war? 4. Why did not Holland and Denmark declare war on Germany also? 5. What was the main difference between the English blockade of Germany and the German submarine war on England? 6. Was the German government responsible for the acts of its agents in this country? 7. What is the Monroe Doctrine? 8. Why could not the Imperial Government of Germany be trusted? 9. How was this war different for the United States from any previous conflict? 10. What was the greatest obstacle to peace?



CHAPTER XXIV

Europe as it Should Be

Natural boundaries of nations in Europe.—Peoples outside of the nations with whom they belong.—The mixture of peoples in Austria-Hungary, and Russia.—The British Isles.—The Balkan states.—Recent changes in the map.—The wrongs done by mighty nations upon their weak neighbors bring no happiness.

We have several times shown you, in the course of this little history, maps drawn by kings and marked off by diplomacy and through bloodshed. Let us now examine a map of Europe divided according to the race and language of its various peoples. It often happens that the boundaries set by nature, like seas, high mountains, and broad rivers, divide one people from another. It is natural that the people of Italy, for instance, hemmed in by the Alps to the north and by the water on all other sides, should grow to be like each other and come to talk a common language.

In the same way, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Spain, France, Great Britain, and Switzerland have boundaries largely set by nature. On this account, it is not surprising that the map of "Europe as it should be" which unites people of the same blood under the same government, agrees rather closely in some places with the map of Europe as it is.

The boundaries of the kingdom of Spain and those of the kingdom of Portugal fit pretty closely the countries inhabited by Spanish and Portuguese peoples.

There are a few Italians in France, also a few Walloons and Flemish. Otherwise France is largely a unit. Some of the French people are found in Switzerland and others in that part of the German Empire which was taken away from France after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

The Danes are not all living in Denmark. A great many of them inhabit the two provinces of Schleswig and Holstein which were torn away from Denmark by Prussia in 1864. The high mountains of the Scandinavian peninsula separate the Norwegians from the Swedes about as well as they divide the countries geographically.

The Hollanders make a nation by themselves, but part of the northwestern corner of the German Empire is also peopled by Dutch. The territory around Aix-La-Chapelle, although part of the German Empire, is inhabited by Walloons, a Celtic people who speak a sort of French. Belgium, small as it is, contains two different types of population, the Walloons and the Flemish.

The German Empire does not include all of the Germans. A great many of these are to be found in Austria proper, Styria (sty'ria), and the northern Tyrol (ty'rol) (western counties of the Austrian Empire), as well as in the eastern half of Switzerland and the edges of Bohemia. Germans are also to be found in parts of Hungary; and in the Baltic provinces of Russia there are over two million of them.

All of the Italians are not in the kingdom of Italy. The Island of Corsica, which belongs to France, is inhabited by Italians. The province of Trentino (tren ti'no) (the southern half of the Austrian Tyrol) is inhabited almost entirely by Italians, as is also Istria, which includes the cities of Trieste, Pola, and Fiume. Certain islands off the coast of Dalmatia are also largely Italian in their population.

The republic of Switzerland is inhabited by French, Italians, and Germans. Besides the languages of these three nations, a fourth tongue is spoken there. In the valleys of the southeastern corner of Switzerland are found people who talk a corruption of the old Latin, which they call Romaunsch or Romansh.

Austria-Hungary, as has already been said, is a jumble of languages and nationalities. This empire includes nearly a million Italians in its southwestern corner, and three million Roumanians in Transylvania. It has as its subjects in Bosnia and Herzegovina several million Serbians. In Slavonia (sla vo'ni a), Croatia (cro a'tia), and Dalmatia (dal ma tia), it has two or three million Slavs, who are closely related to the Serbians. In the north, its government rules over several million Czechs (checks) (Bohemians and Moravians) who strongly desire to have a country of their own. It controls also two million Slovaks, cousins of the Czechs, who also would like their independence. In the county of Carniola (car ni o'la), there are one and a half million Slovenes, another Slavic people belonging either by themselves or with their cousins, the Croatians and Serbs.

The German Empire includes several hundred thousand Frenchmen, who want to get back under French control, a million or two Danes, who want once more to belong to Denmark, and several million Poles, who desire to see their country again united.

[Map: Europe as It Should Be]

Russia rules over a mixture of peoples almost as numerous as those composing Austria-Hungary. The Russians themselves are not one people. The Red Russians or Ruthenians are quite different from the people of Little Russia, and they in turn are different from the people of Great Russia, to the north. The Baltic provinces are peopled, not by Russians, but by two million Germans, an equal number of Letts and a somewhat greater number of Lithuanians. North of Riga are to be found the Esthonians, cousins of the Finns. North-west of Petrograd lies Finland, whose people, with the Esthonians, do not belong to the Indo-European family, and who would dearly love to have a separate government of their own.



You have already been told in Chapter V that the country of the English, if limited by race, does not include Wales, Cornwall, or the north of Scotland, but instead takes in the north-eastern part of Ireland and the southern half of the former Scottish kingdom.

Turning to the Balkan states, we find our hardest task, for the reason that peoples of different nationalities are hopelessly mixed and jumbled. There are Turks and Greeks mixed in with the Roumanians and Bulgarians in the Dobrudja. Parts of southern Serbia and portions of Grecian Macedonia are inhabited by people of Bulgarian descent. Transylvania, with the exception of the two little mixture islands mentioned before is inhabited by Roumanians. The southern half of the Austrian province of Bukowina also ought to be part of Roumania, as should the greater part of the Russian state of Bessarabia. Whereas Roumania now has a population of 7,000,000, there are between five and six million of her people who live outside her present boundaries.

The shores and islands of the Aegean Sea should belong to Greece. Greek people have inhabited them for thousands of years. The Albanians are a separate people, while Montenegro and Bosnia should be joined to Serbia.

Turn back to previous maps of Europe in this volume and you will see that most of the changes that have been made of late years are bringing boundaries nearer where they should be. You will also note that wherever there have been recent changes contrary to this plan, they have always resulted in more bloodshed. The partition of Poland, the annexation of Schleswig, Alsace, and Lorraine to Germany, the division of Bulgarian Macedonia between Serbia and Greece, and the seizure of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria are good examples.

Questions for Review

1. What countries of Europe have fairly well-marked natural boundaries? 2. Who are the Walloons? 3. Who are the Romansh people? 4. To what other people are the Esthonians related?



CHAPTER XXV

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

1. How does a nation at war increase its debts? 2. Why do diseases thrive in war time? 3. What became of the Goths and Franks? 4. Why was the reign of Charles XII disastrous to Sweden? 5. What was the effect of Napoleon's many wars upon the strength of the French nation? 6. Is war growing more humane?



CHAPTER XXVI

What Germany Must Learn

The German plot.—What the Czar's prohibition order did.—Where Germany miscalculated.—Where England and America failed to understand.—An appeal to force must be answered by force.—Effect of the Russian revolution.—"It never must happen again."—The league to enforce peace.—The final lesson.

Before 1914 friends of peace in all countries, but especially in English speaking lands, had hoped that there would never again be a real war between civilized nations.

Among the people of the United States and Great Britain it was unbelievable that any group of responsible rulers would deliberately plot, in the twentieth century, the enslaving of the world through military force, as we now know that the war lords of Prussia and Austria planned it. However, the plot was not only made but was almost successful. They made, though, a great mistake in the case of England. They were sure that she would not enter the war. Her turn was to come later on, after France and Russia had been crushed. The German leaders were also mistaken in calculating the time that Russia would take to mobilize her troops. In 1904, at the outbreak of the war against Japan, the Russian soldiers had become so drunk that it was many weeks before they could be gotten into any kind of military shape. But at the outbreak of the great "world-war" the order of the Czar which stopped the sale of strong drink changed all of Prussia's plans. Instead of taking two or three months to assemble her army, Russia had her troops marching in a mighty force through the German province of East Prussia three weeks after the war had opened. The result was that the German soldiers had to be sent back from northern France to stop the victorious march of the Slavs. The battle of the Marne, fought in the first week of September, 1914, decided the fate of the world. It hung in the balance long enough to prove that a small addition to the forces on either side might have made all the difference in the world in the final outcome. The little British army, which was less than one-eighth of the force of the Allied side, probably furnished the factor that defeated the Germans. The presence in the battle of the German troops who had been withdrawn to stop the Russians, might have given victory to the invaders.

Germany made a mistake, also, in expecting Italy to join in the attack on France. Any one of these three factors might have won the war in short order for the forces of Austria and Germany. With France crushed, as she might have been, in spite of her heroic resistance, without the help of the tiny British army, or with the intervention of Italy on the side of her former allies, it would have been no difficult task for the combined forces of Germany and Austria to pound the vast Russian armies into confusion, collect a big indemnity from both France and Russia, and be back home, as the Kaiser had promised, before the leaves fell from the trees.

As has been said, the great majority of the citizens in nations where the people rule, could not believe that in this day and age the rulers of any civilized country would deliberately plot robbery and piracy on so grand a scale. They had looked forward to the time when all nations might disarm and live in peace with their neighbors. In France alone, of all the western nations, was there any clear idea of the Prussian plan. France, having learned the temper of the Prussian war lords in 1870, France, burdened by a national debt heaped high by the big indemnity collected by the Germans in '71, looked in apprehension to the east and leaped to arms at the first rattling of the Prussian saber.

Germany, up to 1866 renowned chiefly for her poets, musicians, and thinkers, had since been fed for nearly fifty years upon the doctrine that military force is the only power in the world worth considering. Some of the German people still cling to the high ideals of their ancestors, but the majority had drunk deeply of the wine of conquest and were intoxicated with the idea that Germany's mission in life was to conquer all the other nations of the world and rule them for their own good by German thoroughness and by German efficiency. It may take many years to stamp this feeling out of the German nation. As they have worshipped force and appealed to force as the settler of all questions, so they will listen to reason only after they have been thoroughly crushed by a superior force. The sufferings brought upon the German nation by the war have had a great effect in making them doubt whether, after all, force is a good thing. As long as the people could be kept enthusiastic through stories of wonderful victories over the Russians, the Serbians, and then the Roumanians, they were contented to endure all manner of hardships.

Someone has said that no people are happier than those living in a despotism, if the right kind of man is the despot. So the German people, although they were governed strictly by the military rule, nevertheless, were contented as long as they were prosperous and victorious in war. With the rumors and fears of defeat, however, they began to doubt their government. There are indications that sweeping reforms in the election of representatives in the Reichstag and in the power of that body itself will take place before long.

The Russian revolution was in some respects a blow to the central powers. In the first place the fact that Russia had a despot for a ruler while England, France, and Italy were countries where the people elected their law makers, made it impossible that there should be the best of understanding between the allies. Then, again, the various peoples of Austria-Hungary, while they were not happy under the rule of the Hapsburg family, were afraid lest, if they became subjects of the Czar, it would be "jumping from the frying pan into the fire." They would rather bear the evils of the Austrian rule than risk what the Czar and the grand dukes might do to them. Turkey, likewise, was bound to stick to Germany to the end, because of her fear that Russia would seize Constantinople. When the new government of Russia, then, announced that they did not desire to annex by force any territory, but only wished to free the peoples who were in bondage, it removed the fear of the Turks as far as their capital city was concerned; it showed the Poles, Ruthenians, and Czechs of Austria that they were in no danger of being swallowed up in the Russian empire, but that, on the other hand, the Russians wanted them to be free, like themselves; it showed the German people how easily a whole nation, when united, could get rid of its rulers, and encouraged the bold spirits who had never favored the military rule.

The nations of the Entente, including the United States, are now united in an effort to stamp out the curse of feudalism in Austria and in Germany—a curse which has disappeared from all other parts of the civilized world. They are united to crush the military spirit of conquest which exists among the war leaders of the Prussians. They are pledged "to make the world safe for democracy" as President Wilson has said; to do away with the rule of force. So long as the governments of Germany, Austria, and Turkey place the military power at all times above the civil power, so long will it be necessary to police the world. There must be no repetition of the savage attack of August, 1914. There was a time when many of us believed that some one nation, by disbanding its army and refusing to build warships, might set an example of disarming which all the world would finally follow. It now is plain that there must be a "League to Enforce Peace" as Ex-President Taft and other American statesmen have declared. The United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Serbia, Greece, together with Spain, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other nations where the will of the people is the law, must unite in an alliance which will insist on arbitration as a means of settling disputes.