Costs of all Wars Are Huge(in more ways than can be counted)

In the meanwhile, all the countries in the war were rapidly rushing
toward bankruptcy. England spent $30,000,000 a day; France, Germany,
and Austria nearly as much apiece. Thus in the course of a year, a
debt of $300 was piled upon every man, woman, and child in the British
kingdom. The average family consists of five persons, so that this
means a debt of $1500 per family for each year that the war lasted.
The income of the average family in Great Britain is less than $500 in
a year, and the amount of money that they can save out of this sum is
very small. Yet the British people are obliged to add this tremendous
debt to the already very large amount that they owe, and will have to
go on paying interest on it for hundreds of years.

In the same fashion, debts piled up for the peoples of France,
Germany, Austria, Russia and all the countries in the war. In spite of
what we have said above of the average income of English families,
Great Britain is rich when compared with Austria and Russia. What is
more, Great Britain is practically unscarred, while on the continent
great tracts of land which used to be well cultivated farms have been
laid waste with reckless abandon. East Prussia, Poland, Lithuania,
Galicia, part of Hungary, Alsace, Serbia, Bosnia, northern France,
south-western Austria-Hungary, and all of Belgium and Roumania, a
territory amounting to one-fifth of the whole of Europe, were scarred
and burned and devastated.

It will be years and years before these countries recover from the
effects of war's invasion. For every man killed on the field of
battle, it is estimated that two people die among the noncombatants.
Children whose fathers are at the front, frail women trying to do the
work of men, aged inhabitants of destroyed villages die by the
thousands from want of food and shelter.

In the trail of war come other evils. People do not have time to look
after their health or even to keep clean. As a result, diseases like
the plagues of olden times, which civilization thought it had killed,
come to life again and destroy whole cities. The dreadful typhus fever
killed off one-fifth of the population of Serbia during the winter of
1914. Cholera raged among the Austrian troops in the fall of the same
year. For every soldier who is killed on the field of battle, three
others die from disease or wounds or lack of proper care.

In time of war, the first men picked are the very flower of the
country, the strong, the athletic, the brave, the very sort of men who
ought to be carefully saved as the fathers of the people to come. As
these are killed or disabled, governments draw on the older men who
are still vigorous and hardy. Then finally they call out the unfit,
the sickly, the weak, the aged, and the young boys. As a general rule,
the members of this last class make up the bulk of the men who survive
the war. They, instead of the strong and healthy, become the fathers
of the next generation of children.

In the days of the Roman republic, 220 years B.C., there stood on the
coast of North Africa a city named Carthage, which, like Rome, owned
lands far and near. Carthage would have been satisfied to "live and
let live," but Rome would not have it so. As a result, the two cities
engaged in three terrible wars which ended in the destruction of
Carthage. But before Carthage was finally blotted off the map, her
great general, Hannibal, dealt Rome a blow which brought her to her
knees, and came very near destroying her completely. Five Roman
armies, averaging 30,000 men apiece, he trapped and slaughtered. The
death of these 150,000 men was a loss from which Rome never recovered.
From this time on, her citizens were made of poorer stuff, and the old
Roman courage and Roman honor and Roman free government began to
decline.