A General Sketch of the European War: The First PhaseBelloc, Hilaire
History
A General Sketch of the European War: The First Phase
Belloc, Hilaire
World War, 1914-1918
The position of the original belligerent countries (excluding Turkey)
upon the map of Europe was that which will be seen upon the
accompanying sketch map.
Of this belligerent area, which is surrounded by a thick black line,
the part left white represents the territory of the Allies at the
origin of the war--Great Britain, France, Russia, and Servia. This
reservation must, however, be made: that in the case of Russia only
the effective part is shown, and only the European part at that;
Arctic Russia and Siberia are omitted. The part lightly shaded with
cross lines represents the Germanic body--to wit, the German Empire
and Austria-Hungary.
1. The first thing that strikes the eye upon such a map is the great
size of the Germanic body.
[Illustration: Sketch 4.]
When one reads that "Germany" was being attacked by not only France
and England, but also Russia; when one reads further that in the Far
East, in Asia, Japan was putting in work for the Allies; and when one
goes on to read that Belgium added her effort of resistance to the
"German" invasion, one gets a false impression that one single nation
was fighting a vast coalition greatly superior to it. Most people had
an impression of that kind, in this country at least, at the outset of
the war. It was this impression that led to the equally false
impression that "Germany" must necessarily be beaten, and probably
quickly beaten.
The truth was, of course, that we were fighting something very much
bigger than "Germany." We set out to fight something more than twice
as big as Germany in area, and very nearly twice as big as the German
Empire in mere numbers. For what we set out to fight was not the
German Empire, but the German Empire _plus_ the whole of the dominions
governed by the Hapsburg dynasty at Vienna.
How weighty this Germanic body was geographically is still more
clearly seen if we remember that Russia north of St. Petersburg is
almost deserted of inhabitants, and that the true European areas of
population which are in conflict--that is, the fairly well populated
areas--are more accurately represented by a modification of the map
on page 81 in some such form as that on page 84, where the comparative
density of population is represented by the comparative distances
between the parallel cross-lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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