EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

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Germany. Defeated, exhausted, blockaded, Germany passed through a staggering cycle of panics, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary outbreaks, financial debacles, governmental upheavals. Her Army was disarmed, her fleet scuttled, her merchant marine forfeited, but 62,000,000 Germans nevertheless remained to be fed, clothed, housed, organized in some political community. Europe's new States outside Germany emerged slowly, bumped shoulders, clashed over boundaries, made alliances. But Germany remained Europe's central problem, while Russia was still split with civil war. For the first five years of peace, from the Armistice to the Ruhr, the biggest development in Europe, outside of Russia, was France's policy of keeping Germany weak.

Weak Germany certainly was. At the War's end, after the Versailles Treaty, she had lost:

> 1,700,000 killed in battle, 4,200,000 wounded, 1,150,000 missing.

> Alsace-Lorraine, most of Posen and West Prussia, all her colonies, other territorial concessions.

> 18,000,000 of her population, over 1,000.000 square miles of her territory, 45% of her coal, 65% of her iron ore, 15% of her arable lands, 10% of her factories, 5,100,000 tons of her merchant fleet.

> To France she agreed to deliver 105,000 tons of benzol, 150,000 tons of coal tar, 90,000 tons of sulfate of ammonia, 500 stallions, 30,000 mares, 2,000 bulls, 90,000 cows, 1,000 rams, 100,000 sheep, 10,000 goats, and she agreed to pay (but paid only in part) $5,000,000,000 reparations before May 1921.

But 62,000,000 Germans weakened to desperation seemed as menacing to the rest of the world as, to France in her post-War mood, they seemed reassuring. Inside Germany political chaos became almost normal, marked by Communist and reactionary uprisings, the brief soviet of Bavaria, by Putsche like those of Kapp, Hitler and Ludendorff. Walther Rathenau, brilliant economist, industrialist, Foreign Minister, was assassinated by two young nationalists who sped past his automobile on the way to the Foreign Office, tossed hand grenades into it, riddled his mangled body with shots from a Lewis gun, then committed suicide in a castle hideout in Thuringia. But Rathenau's murder was not the only one: Liberal Matthias Erzberger and Socialist Kurt Eisner were killed; Revolutionists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht were kidnapped and murdered.

Outside Germany the States created by the Treaty of Versailles and the treaties which followed it were linked to France in a chain of alliances. Poland and France in the treaty of February 19, 1921 pledged themselves to mutual assistance in the event of German aggression. When Belgium and Czecho-Slovakia also signed with France, the ring around Germany was closed. When Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania, formed another such ring around Hungary—and this ring was coordinated with the other by the Franco-CzechoSlovakian alliance — French security against possible German ambitions seemed as solid as diplomatic measures, military might, economic dominance, could make it.