EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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For nine years the whole world (pop. 2,134,000,000), with brief exceptions here and there, has been in a Great Depression. At some point in these bitter years, the post-War world became a pre-War world—that is, a world anticipating World War. Millions and millions of young men, in the U. S. as elsewhere, had a War marked fatalistically on their private calendars.

Since the big guns began to go off or to be wheeled into place, most U. S. readers have followed current European history closely and anxiously. Not so familiar to them is the history of the period immediately before it—the sequence of post-War settlements, conferences, treaties that began when the Armistice was signed. Briand with his drooping lips and shaggy head, Stresemann with his dueling scars, Sir Austen Chamberlain with his monocle, his glassy stare and elegance of dress, are names in history books for high-school students, dim recollections for those students' parents.

Only voluminous histories can retrace the steps of post-War diplomacy, unravel post-War complexities. But refreshing memories of events since the Armistice makes last week's war news seem less abrupt, the transition from post-War to pre-War less startling. Against the broad sweep of history, that period is brief—246 months, 1,063 weeks, 7,453 days, time for 20 wheat crops, for 20 classes to graduate.

War's End. In periods of sweeping change history is measured by days and hours, not by years. In the last weeks of the War events followed each other so rapidly that General Foch himself could not believe that the end was in sight. Only one month before the end, when he was launching what he called "the greatest of all battles," Foch was making plans for campaigns the next year. Then, in 300 hours:

> Turkey appealed for an armistice; Belgrade, Trieste, fell to the Allies; Austria-Hungary signed an armistice; sailors of the German Grand Fleet, ordered to sea in a move of desperation, mutinied; Socialist Kurt Eisner led a monster demonstration in Munich which culminated in the proclaiming, November 8, of the Bavarian Socialist Republic; the German Majority Socialists served the Kaiser with an ultimatum to abdicate; revolution spread to Frankfort, Cologne, Diisseldorf, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Madgeburg, Brunswick; the rulers of Brunswick, Bavaria, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, abdicated; the Kaiser fled; the German Republic was proclaimed; Croatian independence was proclaimed in Zagreb; a revolt in Budapest put liberal Count Karolyi in power.

> The German Army, which had already retreated 100 miles, with a loss by capture of 390,000 men and 6,600 guns—the largest in the history of military operations—fled through Belgium, Holland, over the Rhine, swiftly and efficiently, in a manner that Liddell Hart viewed not as a rout but as a skilful military movement.

> The Allied pursuit through Belgium, Luxemburg, Alsace-Lorraine penetrated Germany to the left bank of the Rhine and 30 kilometers beyond the bridgeheads at Mainz, Coblentz, Cologne. By the terms of the Armistice, Germany delivered 5,000 locomotives, 150,000 railroad cars, 5,000 trucks to the Allies, and U. S. General Tasker Bliss, astute observer, antimilitarist general, feared the sort of peace that generals and politicians would dictate.