Show HOW WARS ARE WON AND LOST history reveals pestilence as big factor war Is merely a gang fight be tween remnants of armies which haie survived ved camp eald epidemics iners iliad opens with a pestilence and so does the oedipus res rex of sophocles the plague at athens which slew pericles may have col lapsed the athenian empire en pire quite as directly as the sicilian disaster it was an epidemic which turned back xerxes invasion of greece the dis eases which thwarted the cartha givians in sicily in and B C contributed by depriving them of that base against italy to the vie tory of home rome in the punic wars and thus to the result that european civilization Is predominantly hellenic instead of semitic the fall of rome itself may be explained by cs which ravaged italy from the first century to the sixth century for it would be impossible to maintain permanently a poll political and social octal organization of the type and magnitude of rome pome in the face of complete lack of modern sanitary know knowledge lede the crusaders were balked by epidemics more decosi decisively vely than by the saracens in 1098 a christian army of SOO WO melted in a year to and if one would read the details of their sickness and still keep an appetite for lunch eon he needs to be a doctor the thirty years war was blown this way and that like the damned souls in dante by deadly epidemics dys antery in a decisive campaign threw victory to the french revolution tl V en tin r fth h ahus to annihilate napoleons napoleon s army on its retreat from moscow thus disease has decided more campaigns than caesar hannibal and napoleon general jingle breeches omits to reflect that be they brae brane as your soldiers can not fight when they are dead of dis ease the epidemics get the blame for defeat the generals get the credit for victory this Is still appi appl cable to modern times expert ence in the cantonments of 1917 and in the sanitation of active troops showed that war Is today 75 per cent an engineering and sanitary problem and a little less than 25 per cent a military one other things being approximately equal that army will win wl ich has the best engi and sanitary s orvices the only reason this Is not apparent in i ars Is because the military minds on both sides are too superb to notice that both armies are simul immobilized by the same diseases typhus concludes dr hans masser in his blo biography graph y 1 of I that disease entitled hats rats lice and history has at least as just a reason to claim that it won the war as any of the contending nations many a french barroom fight might h have a ve been avoided if this had been clearly understood boston globe |