3. THE AFRICAN FRONT 



IN THE civilized part of the world the soil, the plants, and 

 the animals are so completely under the domination of 

 man that one can scarcely see the play of the great natural 

 forces, free from the modifications made by man. 



In the First World War I attempted an interpretation of 

 man at war in France 1 rich, beautiful France, for ages 

 modified by a brilliant, industrious, artistic people, a land 

 of terraced vineyards and trained trees, a land of metaled 

 highways and model villages, a land where the cycle of 

 fertilizing, sowing, reaping, and fertilizing again keeps a 

 part of the surface of the earth in ceaseless rotation. 



It was from this territory, at an intensely human stage, 

 that I viewed the Great War. On this land masses of French, 

 German, English, Italian, American, Australian, New Zea- 

 land, East Indian, Canadian, and Portuguese troops were 

 crowded in dense concentration. On this land was also the 

 greatest massing of human mechanisms ever seen. There 

 were mules, horses, dogs and pigeons, bred and trained by 

 man. There were such nonliving mechanisms of energy as 

 motor cars, tanks and tractors, airplanes and balloons, 

 shells and bullets, bombs and mines, firebrands and poison 

 gas; there were bayonets and trench mortars, radio and tele- 

 graph, Red Cross nurses, surgeons, priests, prayers, and oaths. 



In our expeditions to equatorial Africa I visited a front 

 that civilized man has not dominated; a front in many 

 respects as intensive as the French front of the First World 

 War, though devoid of civilized elements; a front that 

 derived its driving energy from the equatorial sun and some 

 of its rich soil energy from one of the greatest events in 

 geologic time, namely, the formation of the great rift 

 between Africa and Asia. 



1 "A Mechanistic View of War and Peace," The Macmillan Company, New 

 York, 1915. 



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