People of Europe Cannot Be Rallied into War Again, Feb. 4, 1919

From the editorial page of the Hickory Daily Record, Feb. 4, 1919. Oswald Schuette covered World War I  from the German side for the Chicago Daily News until the United States entered the war in 1917.

People Have Had Enough

By Oswald F. Schuette

The people of Europe cannot be rallied into war again. This is no idle prophecy. I know whereof I speak. The people of Europe know what war means. We do not.  They have had four fearful years of it—years of bloodshed, of starvation, of devastation, of pestilence, of anguish of mind and of soul. To us in the United States it meant two pounds of sugar a week. How few of us ever missed a meal in all this world of hunger? In France, every fourth man was in the casualty list. We had 1 in 20.

The people of Europe will not fight again for anybody’s imperialism. Governments may fight for conquest Kaisers and generals and statesmen may make war for glory. But the people fight only for peace. In this great war, on both sides of the trenches, soldiers battled for peace and only for peace. They have that peace now. Homeward bound from the trenches to mothers and wives and sweethearts and children, no cry of conquest or revenge or indemnity can recall them to the battlefield. If the peace terms at Paris are such that it takes arms and bloodshed to enforce them, they will not be enforced. No soldier will lay down his life to collect a dollar or a billion dollars.

What a bankruptcy of statesmanship it would be if the Paris conference found no cure for the stricken nations but more war!

There lies the danger of driving the sword into the arms of bolshevism. The people of Europe are not bolshevists at heart—not even in Russia. But if the only refuge from war is bolshevism, they will fall under its flag.