The Military historian and economist Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AN ESTIMATE OF THE SITUATION An attempt to estimate the situation reached in the world war seems almost foolhardy. The criteria that might be applied to a nor... more »mal military problem, or let us say to such problems as we find in the pages of history, are obviously inadequate. To judge of the situation of France and Germany on the day after the battle of St. Privat in 1870, or of the Northern and Southern States after let us say Gettysburg or the Wilderness, was clearly child's play compared with an attempt to fathom what the future may have in store now. If any attempt is made to state here what the immediate future has in store for the belligerents, it can be at the best but a patchy and unsatisfactory effort. Probably the greatest difficulty of all lies in estimating the psychological factors. At no previous epoch have we seen a war so fundamentally a war of opinion as the present one. For how many years, and by what forceful methods, was Germany indoctrinated with the ideas that made her respond with something like enthusiasm to the call of war when it burst over astonished Europe in August, 1914! What terrific blows it took to stiffen her opponents' psychology to the point of waging war with a determination equally fierce! And what a marvelous weapon of war the press has been with its systematic demolishment of the enemy's morale and aspirations, a demolishment as systematic as that inflicted by the high explosive shells on their intrenchments! And, as we look back at the working of this process over the last three years, we can detect marked changes in public opinion, with well defined curves and the accumulation, one might almost say, of heavy masses of opinion at some points and their dissipation at others. To estimate all this range of facts, to judge of the outcome i...« less