CHAPTER V
PSYCHOLOGY AND CAUSES WHICH PREPARED THE NATION FOR WAR
To the outsider, the Germans seem a fierce and martial nation.
But, in reality, the mass of the Germans, in consenting to the
great sacrifice entailed by their enormous preparations for war,
have been actuated by fear.
This fear dates from the Thirty Years' War, the war which commenced
in 1618 and was terminated in 1648. In 1648, when the Treaty
of Westphalia was concluded, Germany was almost a desert. Its
population had fallen from twenty millions to four millions.
The few remaining people were so starved that cannibalism was
openly practised. In the German States polygamy was legalised,
and was a recognised institution for many years thereafter.
Of thirty-five thousand Bohemian villages, only six thousand
were left standing. In the lower Palatinate only one-tenth of the
population survived; in Wurttemberg, only one-sixth. Hundreds of
square miles of once fertile country were overgrown with forests
inhabited only by wolves.
A picture of this horrible period is found in the curious novel,
"The Adventurous Simplicissimus," written by Grimmelshausen, and
published in 1669, which describes the adventures of a wise peasant
who finally leaves his native Germany and betakes himself to a desert
island which he refuses to leave when offered an opportunity to
go back to the Fatherland.
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