New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1917-11-20


when the Germans were almost in Paris.
The Marine never quite removed that first
chill, just as Gettysburg never quite re-
moved Bull Run from Northern memory.
Yet the odd thing about wars is that
with mighty few exceptions they end in
victories for the stronger party, if he
doesn't lose his courage or get put out by
the first wild rush of his foe. When you
read history in peace times you feel quite
the same about the defeat of Louis XIV
and the operation of the law of gravlta-
ton. You sec the thing unfold in per-
fectly logical and natural manner and
wonder why any one but Louis could
have been nervous about the result. Now
adays the real emotion in reading about
the Civil War is one of surprise that any
one could have expected any other out
come than Appomattox. AS for the doubts,
fears, terrors of our grandfathers-they
are become as foolish as belief in ghosts.
Underneath all superficial and transi-
tory emotion the real history goes for
ward, empires are won and lost, wars
fought to their logical ending, and one can
measure their stages with almost the same
degree of accuracy that the thermometer
supplies in the case Of bodily disease.
There is little that is novel in the last
four or five centuries of European his
tory. Since nations took shape in our
modern world. every attempt of one peo-
pie to dominate all, to rule Europe, has
failed in the end, despite brilliant pre-
liminary successes and considerable tenn
porary achievement.
If you were going to bet on a war, as
you do on ball game or horse-race, the
odds would always be against the one and
with the many, because, although the one
has often made a remarkable fight, he has
invariably lost in the end, when his stake
was the mastery of the world. The Ger
mans had not as good a chance in 1914 as
Napoleon had when he began in 1905, and
he lost. Louis XIV had everything in his
favor when he stepped over into Holland
by way of Liege, establishing the prece-
dent followed by the Germans, with re-
versal of direction only. But it was
France and not Europe that lost when
Louis came to the end of his wars.
If the past is any source of light, then
the German defeat is assured. Sea power,
too, has enabled Britain to emerge vic
torious from all her wars with her great
Continental rivals, and to-day Britain has
a supremacy at sea she did not have when
she fought Napoleon. And so on, you can
90 down the whole list of precedents and
past performances and without exception
they ali have the same lesson. Does this
help the man who reads in the headlines
that the Germans have taken Asiago?
Not bit of it! Does it help the states
man or the general? Not in the smallest
degree. Does it help any one now alive
and concerned with the war? Not for a
moment. The truth is that none Of us
can get out of our war mood for the neces-
sary moment which might save us so
much of fret and fear.
There is one more aid available. When
Napoleon was sweeping over Europe with
Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland to his
credit, with entrances into Vienna and
Berlin, Madrid and Warsaw, little prince
in a small German state told Goethe that
the thing could not last because it was not
right: it was violation of human and
divine laws. And it did not last. The
tyranny of Spain could not last, and it
was far less brutal tyranny than that
of the Germans, because the Spanish had
the Latin inheritance. Unhappily faith
is not one of the assets of this generation
of mankind, and the less we believe the
more we fear.
Things being what they are, therefore,
we shall probably have to have our spells
of depression, as necessary to us as
Blanche Amory's emotions" were to that
estimable little lady. The thoughtful
Teuton who knows how to set in motion
certain mental processes in his foes mind,
although he never can understand any of
the other processes in that mind, will
probably turn some of these fits of de-
preston to temporary advantage. Yet it