Show HOW WARS ARE WON AND LOST history reveals pestilence as big factor war Is merely a gang fight between ren remnants mants of 0 armies which have bave survived camp epidemics homers fillad Ili iid opens with a pestilence tind and so BO does the oedipus ibex ke of sophocles the plague at athens alch slew Per leles may have collapsed the athenian Allien lan empire quite as directly ns as the sicilian disaster it was an epidemic which turned back xerxes invasion of greece the diseases which thwarted the cartha in sicily in pad and 13 C contributed by dep depriving them of that base against italy to the victory of rome in the panic wars and thus to the result that european is predominantly hellenic instead of semitic the fall of rome itself may be explained by the which ravaged italy from the first century to the sixth century for it would be impossible to maintain permanently a political and social organization of the type and magnitude of rome in the face of complete lack of modern sanitary knowledge tile the crusaders were balked by epidemics more decisively than by the saracens saracena Sara cens in 1008 a christian army of melted in a year to find and it if one would mould read the details of their sickness find and still keep an appetite for luncheon he needs to ile be a doctor the thirty years war mar 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 lien tir ir ta ahus to annihilate napoleons army arm on its retreat from moscow thus thug disease has decided more campaigns than caesar hannibal and napoleon general jingle breeches omits to reflect that be they braie bine as lucifero Ln Lu cifers your lour soldiers cannot fight when they are dead of disease the epidemics get the blame for defeat the generals get the credit for victory this Is still applicable to modern times experience in ill the cantonments canton ments of 1017 and in the sanitation of 0 active troops showed that war mar 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 min which has the best engl engi and sanit sanitary nry services the only reason this la Is riot not apparent in wars Is because uie the military minds on both sides are too superb to notice that both armies are simultaneously immobilized by the same diseases typhus concludes dr inns Zin in his biography of that disease entitled hats lice and history lias has nt at least as lust just a reason to claim that it won the war as any of 0 the contending nations many a french barroom fight might have beer been avoided it if this had been clearly understood boston globe |