THE WORLD WAR.

Bruce Herald, Volume LI, Issue 67, 30 August 1915, Page 3

THE WORLD WAR.

The present struggle between the nations has been described as the greatest of all wars and unlike any other war, and the truth of these descriptions is surely apparent. Twelve nations are already in the arena. Three others are visibiy preparing to enter it; a fourth, across the Atlantic, may not impossibly be likewise drawn into it; of no European country, unless, perhaps, it be Spain, can one predict an absolute and permanent neutrality; while at the otner ends of the earth China and the great .Republics of South America alone seem secure in their present immunity. The Dardanelles War alone .is the .biggest Great Britain has ever engaged in apart from the war 111 Flanclers and the South African War. Fuily half the entire population of the world and all but three-fifths of its total* land surlace are at this moment to be classed as belligerent. In Europe, of course, the proportion is much larger. Out of every seven square miles of European soil the warring Powers own five; out of every dozen persons 10 are their subjects. Over 400,u00,000 people in Europe, occupying, roughly, 3,000,000 square miles of territory, are at- war. Fewer than 6U,0U0,U00 are at peace. But even this percentage is exceeded in the case of Africa, if we include Morocco among the French possessions the only neutral States in that vast continent are the kingdom of Abyssinia., the Spanish colonies, and the Republic of Liberia, and they cover barely l-20th of the whole area and contain less than l-17th of its inhabitants, In Asia all but half the. population and over half of the territory aire embraced in the struggle. In North America above the Rio Grande slightly more than half the area and about l-12th of the population own allegiance j to one of the belligerent nations. South | America alone shows a genuine surpms j of neutrality. Only about l-56th of its surface and considerably less than one per cent, of its peoples come within Me category of combatants. Adding it all together a reliable statistician estimates that some 30,000,000 square : m-iles and not far short of 1,000,0w i people are involved m the war. By far j the greater part of these colossal totals falls to the share of the Allies. In Europe alone they own nearly six times as much territory as the Germans and their lurkish ally; while throughout the world their land possessions are nearly 13 times as great and their population all but six times as numerous as those of their enemies. The Governments of the belligerent States were raising in the year before the war about a thousand and a-half millions or revenue and the annual foreign trade of their peoples, which was, of course, but a fraction of their total buying and selling, ran in the neighborhood of five thousand millions. Such sums defy vital comprehension. In point of the actual area, however, over which the fighting has taken place, tire present struggle has not yet fetched a wider compass than the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic wars. For *ll that it is sufficiently diffused. Its guns have been heard on every ocean from the North Sea to the Bay of Bengal, among the beanfields of Shantung, m the islands of the Pacific, off the Chilian coast and the Falkland Islands, on the banks of the Nile, at the head of the. Persian Gulf, along the courses of the 1 Tigris and Euphrates, amid the wastes of South-West- Africa, the oil palms of Togo! and and the Cameroons, the uplands of East Africa, in the Caucasus and the Italian Alps, in the Dardanelles and Syria and across the Persian frontier, round the east coast of Britain, and over the heart of Europe from Paris to Warsaw, from Switzerland to the sea, from the Danube to the BalOther wars have seen huge armies —-Napoleon 103 years ago crossed the Niemen at the head of 680,000 men—but this onie alone lias witnessed some 20,000,000 men under arms. Other wars have been* in the main wars of soldiers; this is a wax of peoples. Other wars have been expensive, but in this war alone has civilisation spent £10,000,000 or £12,000,000 per day on blowing itself to pieces. Other wars were fought when industrialism was still in its infancy and before the railway, the cable, the telegraph, the steamship, and the universal web of commerce and credit had compressed humanity for a thousand purposes into a single, sentient and interdependent organism. Their effects, therefore, were chiefly local to the peoples immediately engaged in them. The effects of this one are world-wide. Other Avars brought in their train a limited disturbance and disorganisation where this one brings universal cataclysm. Armies used! to be numbered by the score or the hundreds of thousands. Now they are counted by the millions. Battles that formerly were fought out on a manageable front, were over in two or three days, and led to decisive results, now stretch into weeks, along lines 1000 miles long, and have no conclusive issue. Where fighting was once open and visible we have to-day a subterranean warfare of interminable clinches. Where the men used to predominate over the machine we see to-day the human factor waiting upon the subordinate to the material! In the air and below the sea, by mines and bombs, and torpedoes and barbed wire, and trenches and concrete, and machine guns firing 600 rounds a minute, and hurricanes of shells like inverted earthquakes. War. once a matter of movement and elbow-room, and the shock of great charges, has been pegged down to a series of sieges and assaults, to ironmongery, chemists, and the overpowering appliances of mechanical science. Truly this war (points out Sydney Brooks in 'The Daily Mail') is unlike any other war. No struggle was ever so extensive and so none destroyed life and wealth at a greater rate, none brought into play as this one does the whole of each belligerent's moral, physical and intelleotual power, none ever left so deep a mark on the political arrangements, the economic and social life of such multitudes of peoples, none was so clearly a contest of sheer endurance. There have been in the past, as the result of war, dynastic revolutions, enormous territorial. readjustments, sweeping political transformations. This wiair will repeat history but on a larger scale, and, let us hope, with better judgment. Every single question that has harassed European statesmen for the past 100 years is involved in it. Such changes of the map as the world has never known are to-day on the anvil of war, and nationality and democracy, the two forces that by themselves differentiate this from all previous struggles, will shape them to their will. The real 'test that determines how far this war transcends all its predecessors is the revolution it is already working and will continue to work in the ideals, the the whole scale . aas

spirit of existence of the millions who are waging it.