(^466) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
ders fields seems to have come as a great surprise. Obtuse commanders
reckoned with impeccable logic that the army with the last troops
standing and shooting would win. The generals got promotions, hon
ors, and statues, usually on horseback. Their men died in the mud.
The losses of war were compounded by the blunders of peace. Perhaps
that is unfair, and statesmen and diplomats were stuck with a legacy of
hatred and revenge that left litde room for reason. Could France be
generous to Germany? In 1870, Germany invaded France, and after
few casualties and no damage to its own territory, had used its victory
to compel an extortionate indemnity. Now Germany had invaded
France again, killing well over a million Frenchmen and wasting the
richest industrial regions, pulling out as soon as the Allied armies
threatened to move on to German land. Could France let them get
away with that? How to calculate such losses? How much for vicious
intentions? What if the Germans had won?
And what about the home fronts? The Germans did not surrender
in 1918; they concluded an armistice. They had lost, but had not ad
mitted defeat. German (and Austrian) malcontents and chauvinists
cried betrayal: we were stabbed in the back. Villains were there for the
marking—Jews to begin with, also socialists, and even better, the two
together. Meanwhile tsarist Russia had collapsed, first into civil war
and then into a Bolshevist regime that fomented in every country a fes
tering conflict between revolution and status quo. The Soviet rulers
may have settied momentarily for "revolution in one country," but
agents abroad, working with local socialist parties, posed everywhere
an implicit threat to property, hierarchy, and order.
The response, at the extreme, was fascism—a label of diverse content
for a corporatist, status-conscious society under dictatorial rule. The
political rhetoric of the day stressed the differences between socialism-
communism on the far left, fascism on the far right. In fact, the ex
tremes met and resembled each other: in their contempt for
democracy, their pretense to virtue, their abhorrence of bourgeois val
ues, their emphasis on state rather than market direction of the econ
omy. Both sides would have rejected any thought of similarity; but the
number of people who managed to slither from the one to the other
testified to their compatibility.
To contemporaries, the year 1945 was one of triumph and defeat, of
revelation and ruin, of relief and despair, of joy and sorrow. The war
years had witnessed atrocities and cruelties beyond experience: 55 mil-
nora
(Nora)
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