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Show PROBLEMS FACING STRICKEN WORLD Shall Chaos or Reconstruction in Europe Follow the Great World War? NOW WEAK AND HEARTBROKEN In Mourning and Poverty She Counts Her Dead and Looks With Eyes of Sadness Toward the Threat--ening Future. Article II. By FRANK COMERFORD. August 1, 1014, was the day. On that day (Jernmuy declared wur ou Kussla. The tire alarm rang arolmd the world. Peasants in the field straightened their backs, listeued and looked into the snu confused, wondering. wonder-ing. Flags were unfurled, ' bauds played, faces were white, tense and serious. Men left their work and talked lu groups on the street corners. Women laid down their brooms, put aside their washing, and talked In whispers; sad lights were in their eyes. Children stopped playing. Something Some-thing had happened. Evil things were ahead. August 0 and 4 found France and Great Britain mobilizing their sons. The torch was sweeping Europe Eu-rope the fire of death hud started. For four long years heart-sickening years the world ran red. Men waded through mud and "blood, fought, suffered, cursed, prayed, while back home in the manles.s houses women and children worked, cried, prayed and waited. The world was mad. Death poisoned every breath" the ' people breathed. It is over now, it Is finished. A i stunned, numbed, weak, heartbroken Europe is again sitting in the sun of i peace. Europe is In dirty black rags. , The black is mourning, the rags are poverty. Her face is deeply lined trenches made by suffering. Her eyes .1 1 .1 1 flnHnM Hie UmvULU-IL UUU UCJIU. impc: uunv. - weakly in her breast ; faith has faded from her soul. Her home is a house of darkness. The fire on the hearth has turned to cold gray ashes. The kettle no longer sings, it moans. Her mind is weary, her body is wasted. Hunger has robbed her of her strength. Her stockingless, shoeless feet are blue from the cold. Her lips wear starvation color. Ice in the winter's wind lashes her shivering, half-naked body. She mumbles as she stares vacantly va-cantly into spivee she is tired, o tired. As I beheld her it seemed to me that a face so troubled and sad must never have known a smile. I listened to her muttering-. I found that she was counting. Over and over again she counted on her thin, tired, worn hands she was counting bet-dead. Thinking of Her Loss. She was thinking. Her eyes looked over the hundreds of thousands of square miles of war zone, slashed with trenches, pitted and pockmarked by shells. She sees where they fell. No tears are in her eyes.' Long ago the hurt had reached the point where tears dry up. limv upon row, line upon line, mile upon mile, white-painted white-painted wooden crosses mark their 1 graves. For the most part they were i her youngest born, her most beloved, who dug deep in Ihe soil to sleep forever for-ever in the dark dugouts. I As they fell bleeding from steel arid i lead, choking from gas, writhing in agony from tire, they proved in the dy-. dy-. ing word they spoke, that they were ! mere boys, as they had shown in their fighting that they were brave men. To the poppies they Intrusted their message, mes-sage, and the red poppies remember the 'last word of Europe's dying sons, who went out Into the great beyond j with this last word on their lip. "Mother;" She has 'finished counting; an ache shudders through her bent body. She sighs and -sols, "Seven and a half million mil-lion of my sons are dead." Her thoughts turn to the living, her arms open to receive them, she holds them to 'her heart. They have come, but how"? Some with sightless eyes, doomed to grope through The world in n never-ending never-ending darkness, a night without stars or moon; sunless, 'black, hopeless days, and these, too, young men in the very morning of their day. Others sentenced to silence deaf and dumh. Never again will she hear their voices nor will they hear her. SUM others In wheel chairs, dwarfed, legless. More hobbling on crutches, limping on canes. Some with empty sleeves. Many with great scars, where once was a handsfime face. She sees them all. her heart bleeds; the twisted, the mangled. Ihe torn. She Is counting them, the V2.filC.017. the wounded of the war. War's Frightful Cost. Her voice is husky, her bands are tired, but she must count on. Six and n half million of her sons were marked "missing and prisoners" in the official war scire. Many of these have come back to her. but she does not quest ion Xhoiu she dare not. Their fti-v tell of the unspcaknhle horrors they endured. en-dured. She sees'in their eves a di-p'.h of pain that is unf:Mhomahle. She is a mother she knows. The war Is over, but she is nor over Ihe war. Must she never stop counting? count-ing? Is there no end to her lo-ses? The graveyards are crowded. Her thoughts turn to the dead who, while they did not die In the war, died because be-cause of the war. Those who went out In battle left life in a burst of glory. Others there were who fell In their tracks exhaustion, broken hearts sent them "west." She has not forgotten how the home flunk suffered. The stay-at-homes were not all slackers. They fought hunger and cold, bent their backs beyond the straining point. Worst of all, they waited. It Is estimated esti-mated that 20,000.000 civilians died from weakness, fatigue, strain, broken hearts the horror of waiting destroyed de-stroyed resistance. These were the underfed older men and women, the scared, undernourished children.- Is there nny wonder that Europe has 8 denth look In her eyes? Death has been her morning thought, it has been her night sob, and for four years made up of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds death has been her Nemesis. She is now totaling. The figures are appalling. They stagger her imagination. imagina-tion. It is easy to write them. Impossible Im-possible to understand their full meaning. mean-ing. The mind can't grasp it; the world Is bewildered by the number. It Is too stupendous, too horrible for understanding. un-derstanding. Think of It, seven and a half million young men, for the most part between the ages of eighteen and thirty, the youth, the strength, the spirit, the man power of Europe, dead twenty million from civil life dead, over twelve and a half million wounded. wound-ed. Who fan measure this loss"? War brought death. It did more it stopped birth. In the devastated regions re-gions of Belgium, France, Italy, Poland, Po-land, parts of Russia and the Balkan countries, the birth rate fell to almost al-most nothing. In England and Wr.les the birth rate in flie last part of 191 5 was 19.5, the lowest on record. Mal-lett Mal-lett calculated that the birth rate had fallen 12 per cent in England and Wales by 1916. The Journal of Heredity quotes Sav- , orgnan as having estimated that it will take England at least ten years, Germany Ger-many 12 years. Italy 38 years and France 3G years to recuperate their populations. These calculations by Savorgnan were made before the fearful fear-ful losses of the campaign of 1918. A village in France. Blerancourt, tells what the war has done to the man nower of Eurone. This village, wliich is in the Chateau "Thierry-Soissons district, dis-trict, had a population of a thousand people "before the war. Its losses have -been tabulated. Twenty-six soldiers ' from this village were killed in the war. Ninety-seven of the villagers died from war privations. The total of 123 is the death toll of a village of a thousand. The figures I have quoted from the calculations of Savorgnan and Mallett , were made before the war was finished. Since the war, estimates have been made, and these estimates show the situation to be even worse. In France I was told that 57 per cent of the men between twenty and forty years were listed as dead or incapacitated for work. Further, that it would take France over 70 years to recover her normal population. , It is said that it will take Italy ou years and England 2a years to regain normality of population. The human waste of the war Is more than sad memories. The loss of man power makes a grave problem. It has thrown out of balance the domestic scheme of the world. It will 'be felt for years. There are a great many more young women '.linn men. Home life Is 'bound to suffer. There will be fewer marriages, fewer children. Statistics Sta-tistics only tell part of the story. Copyright. .1920. Western Newspaper Union) |