96 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Napoleon abated no whit of his resolve to dominate Germany and disci- 

 pline Russia. . . . He strained every effort to call the youth of the 

 empire to arms . , . and 350,000 conscripts were promised by the Senate. 

 The mighty swirl of the Moscow campaign sucked in 150,000 lads of 

 under twenty years of age into the devouring vortex." " The peasantry 

 gave up their sons as food for cannon." But " many were appalled at 

 the frightful drain on the nation's strength." " In less than half a year 

 after the loss of half a million men a new army nearly as numerous was 

 marshalled under the imperial eagles. But the majority were young, 

 untrained troops, and it was remarked that the conscripts born in the 

 year of Terror had not the stamina of the earlier levies. Brave they 

 were, superbly brave, and the emperor sought by every means to breathe 

 into them his indomitable spirit." "Truly the emperor could make 

 boys heroes, but he could never repair the losses of 1812." " Soldiers 

 were wanting, youths were dragged forth." The human harvest was 

 at its very worst. 



The unfailing result of this must be the failure in the nation of 

 those qualities most sought in the soldier. The result is a crippled 

 nation, " Une nation blessee," to use the words of an honored professor 

 in the University of Paris. The effect would not appear in the efface- 

 ment of art or science, or creative imagination. Men who lead in these 

 regards are not drawn by preference or by conscription to the life of the 

 soldier. If we cut the roots of a tree, we shall not affect, for a time at 

 least, the quality of its flowers or its fruits. We are limiting its future, 

 rather than changing its present. In like manner does war affect the 

 life of nations. It limits the future, rather than checks the present. 



Those who fall in war are the young men of the nations, the men 

 between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, without blemish so far as 

 may be — the men of courage, alertness, dash and recklessness, the men 

 who value their lives as nought in the service of the nation. The man 

 who is left is for better and for worse the reverse of all this, and it is 

 he who determines what the future of the nation shall be. 



However noble, encouraging, inspiring, the history of modern 

 Europe may be, it is not the history we should have the right to expect 

 from the development of its racial elements. It is not the history that 

 would have been made by these same elements released from the shadow 

 of the reversed selection of fratricidal war. And the angle of diver- 

 gence between what might have been and what has been, will be deter- 

 mined by the percentage of strong men slain on the field of glory. 



And all this applies, not to one nation nor to one group of nations 

 alone, but in like degree to all nations, which have sent forth their 

 young men to the field of slaughter. As with Greece and Rome, as with 

 France and Spain, as with Mauritania and Turkestan, so with Ger- 

 many and England, so with all nations who have sent forth " the best 



