EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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The War was over. It ended in bewildering darkness, and, said General Bliss, happiness at its ending was subdued. The old States, the old ways of life, the old political and social organizations of Europe were shattered; 9,000,000 men had been killed in battle or had died of their wounds; 22,000,000 had been wounded; an unknown number of civilians died as a result of the War. "Not until our children's time can the former joy of life come into the world," Bliss remarked. "And it can come then only if our culminating work makes it impossible for them ever to see another such war."

The War was over. Except: >In Russia, the Bolsheviks fought the Whites and the Allies on a great wavering battle line that reached from Archangel to Vladivostok.

> In the Balkans, Greece invaded Turkey, occupied Anatolia, was driven back after more than a year of fighting. Rumanian, Czech and Yugoslavian armies overran Hungary, seized livestock, locomotives, battled the Communist Government of Bela Kun.

> Poland seized Vilna; Lithuania seized Memel; Yugoslavia seized Montenegro.

> In Dublin, a Sinn Fein Government was established within two months of the establishment of a republic in Vienna. For three years the Irish fought the English. At the same time, in Morocco, Riffs fought Spaniards.

Savage and costly though they were, these clashes were minor compared with the titanic conflict that had ended; they were the death struggles of the World War, rather than the War itself. And they were dwarfed by political developments that moved as swiftly, as bewilderingly. In the first 500 days of peace:

> Thirty-five new Governments came into existence in Europe, struggled to establish themselves.

> The Treaty of Versailles set up Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland; wiped off the map Montenegro, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Galicia, Livonia, Courland, Schleswig; established a League of Nations, which 42 nations soon joined.

The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian Empires, under whose political organizations most Europeans lived, were swallowed up in the cataclysm—the Austrian ministry appointed for liquidation found the Empire had disappeared before it could map its program. With them went bureaucrats, ruling cliques, political leaders, military castes, police functionaries, armies of officeholders, diplomats, the props and supports of the ruling dynasties. Replacing them came, along with the new States, new political organizations employing new methods to realize new social theories. In Russia a brilliant group of social theorists under Lenin struggled with rival theoricians, Tsarist generals, Allied intervention, for control of the former Russian Empire, but everywhere social experimentation—good or bad, radical or reactionary—was in the air. It was administered by politicians of a new type—professors like Masaryk, artists like Paderewski, literary figures like Kurt Eisner or D'Annunzio, trade unionists like Ebert, visionaries like Karolyi, soldiers like Pilsudski—and as they consolidated their power or went under, they fitted into a Europe in which the demand for peace dominated everything else.