EUROPE: 1,063 Weeks

(8 of 8)

History is at best violent, doubly so in such periods. Bombers over Shanghai and Guernica, refugees from Barcelona and Prague, tell stories whose raw horror blurs the minds of those who try to understand the causes of war. When philosophers, economists, historians try to penetrate the wild surface of events, to see the forces that have created them, their dry generalizations and statistics seem cold beside the living reality of the headlines. In different terms they state the causes of international conflict—as rivalry between the Haves and the Havenots, between the countries struggling to keep what they have and the countries struggling to expand. Or they see it as the clash of rival ideologies or of rival imperialists, with a vast segment of the world looking to Great Britain to maintain order while protecting her remote dominions, and another segment threatening to block her channels of communication with them. Or they see it as a problem of overpopulation in the crowded centres of the world, the masses of Europe and Japan swelling and pressing against the barriers that block them from the sparsely inhabited areas of the globe. Or they see it as a problem of armaments, the countries jockeying desperately for first place in a race whose only end is death. But however they state it, their theories, analyses, guesses and figures come out the same and say, as do events, that war is inevitable.

But one great difference separates the new period from the one before the World War. Citizens of that pre-War world had no knowledge of what lay ahead of them, had no historical precedent for the tragedy toward which they were moving, and even the statesmen who tried to avert it had no conception of its terrible scope. On the evening of Aug. 3, 1914, when Great Britain pondered war, Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of the Foreign Office, watching the lamps being lit in the summer dusk, and said: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." To those who expect another war, his phrase seems optimistic ; many are in a mood to say: "They will never be lit again."