ABSTRACT
CONDITIONS at the end of World War I were so much like those with which we have become familiar at the end of World War II that we need no detailed picture to bring them home to us. On the whole, they were not so bad as conditions in 1946, although of course to their contemporaries they seemed quite catastrophic. The French, for example, were appalled by the physical destruction in their country. They estimated that 2,700,000 people had been driven from their homes; that 285,000 houses had been destroyed and 411,000 houses damaged; that 22,000 factories, 4,800 kilometres of railways, 1,600 kilometres of canals, 59,000 kilometres of roads and 3,337,000 hectares of arable land had been rendered useless; and so on. 1 But the world destruction done by the 1914 war was small compared with that done by the war of 1939; it was more or less confined to a gash five miles wide across France and Belgium, and it was made good with astonishing speed. There are closer parallels in other spheres. The collapse of Germany as an economic unit on this occasion compares with the collapse last time of Russia and of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with the hunger, exhaustion, bewilderment and economic and moral disintegration, which on both occasions made the organisation of relief measures so urgent a task. There was also, in the political arena, the same sense of hopelessness produced by the immediate outbreak of quarrelling and suspicion between the victors over the fate of the vanquished, with the additional complication last time that war continued in various parts of Europe for some years after the main conflict was over.
