It will be years and years before these countries recover from the effects of war’s invasion.  For every man killed on the field of battle, it is estimated that two people die among the noncombatants.  Children whose fathers are at the front, frail women trying to do the work of men, aged inhabitants of destroyed villages die by the thousands from want of food and shelter.

In the trail of war come other evils.  People do not have time to look after their health or even to keep clean.  As a result, diseases like the plagues of olden times, which civilization thought it had killed, come to life again and destroy whole cities.  The dreadful typhus fever killed off one-fifth of the population of Serbia during the winter of 1914.  Cholera raged among the Austrian troops in the fall of the same year.  For every soldier who is killed on the field of battle, three others die from disease or wounds or lack of proper care.

[Illustration:  Rendered Homeless by War]

In time of war, the first men picked are the very flower of the country, the strong, the athletic, the brave, the very sort of men who ought to be carefully saved as the fathers of the people to come.  As these are killed or disabled, governments draw on the older men who are still vigorous and hardy.  Then finally they call out the unfit, the sickly, the weak, the aged, and the young boys.  As a general rule, the members of this last class make up the bulk of the men who survive the war.  They, instead of the strong and healthy, become the fathers of the next generation of children.

In the days of the Roman republic, 220 years B.C., there stood on the coast of North Africa a city named Carthage, which, like Rome, owned lands far and near.  Carthage would have been satisfied to “live and let live,” but Rome would not have it so.  As a result, the two cities engaged in three terrible wars which ended in the destruction of Carthage.  But before Carthage was finally blotted off the map, her great general, Hannibal, dealt Rome a blow which brought her to her knees, and came very near destroying her completely.  Five Roman armies, averaging 30,000 men apiece, he trapped and slaughtered.  The death of these 150,000 men was a loss from which Rome never recovered.  From this time on, her citizens were made of poorer stuff, and the old Roman courage and Roman honor and Roman free government began to decline.

The Germanic tribes (the Goths, Franks, Lombards, etc.) who swarmed into the Roman Empire about the year 400 A.D., although they were barbarians, nevertheless had many excellent qualities.  They were brave, hardy men and stood for freedom from tyrants.  However, they fought so many wars that they were gradually killed off.  Take the Franks, for example; the three grandsons of Charlemagne, who had divided up his great empire, fought a disastrous war with one another, which ended in a great battle that almost wiped out the Frankish nation.  This happened about 840 A.D.