America in World War 1 (6)

As long as Germany was victorious and her people thought that they
were going to come out of the conflict with added territory and big
money indemnities, war was popular. But with the flower of their young
men slain, and the prospect of conquest and plunder growing smaller
and smaller with each passing month, the Germans, too, are beginning
to hate the thought of war.

The American army can give the finishing touch to the German downfall
along the western front, and the sooner the Germans realize that they
cannot win from the rapidly growing number of their enemies, the
sooner will come the the end of this greatest tragedy in the civilized
world.

The war lords knew that if the war lasted long enough they must be
defeated and they were striving hard all through the years 1916 and
1917 to make peace while they had possession of enough of the enemy's
lands so that they could show their own people some gain in territory
to pay them back for their terrible sufferings. The German war debt
was so great that the war lords dreaded to face their own people after
the latter realized that they had been deceived as well as defeated.
The government had told them (1) that England, France, and Russia
forced this war upon Germany, (2) that the German armies would win the
war in short order, and (3) that a huge sum of money would be
collected from France, Belgium, and Russia to pay the expenses of the
war. The war lords dreaded to think of the time when their people,
knowing that they themselves will have to bear the fearful burden of
war debt, learned also that the whole tragedy was forced upon the
world by the pride and ambition of their own leaders. By Christmas
1917, the Kaiser was once more hinting that Germany was ready to talk
peace. He was wise, for if peace could have been made then it would
have left Germany absolute mistress of all of middle Europe. Austria,
Bulgaria, and Turkey were more under the control of the Kaiser and his
war lords than were parts of his own empire like Bavaria and Saxony.
In Belgium, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania, Roumania, and northern France
the central powers had over forty millions of people who were
compelled to work for them like slaves. The plunder collected from
these countries ran into billions of dollars. The road to the east,
cut asunder by the results of the second Balkan war (see map),
had been forced open by the rush of the victorious German armies
through Serbia and Roumania. A peace at this time would have been a
German victory. With the drain on the man power of the central powers,
with dissatisfaction growing among their people, with the steady
increase in the armies of the United States, time was fighting on the
side of the allies.