There is one aspect of the future of Germany that
has not been much discussed so far. It is impossible to discover what the total of her dead will be by the time the war is ever, or even to make any confident estimate. The official figure for the last war was a little under two millions. In this war, even when allowance is made .for the first nine months in which there was hardly any fighting at all, it will certainly be far higher. The mortality in the Russian campaign, by winter cold as well as deaths in battle, must be immense, and the end is not yet. Then there arc the deaths from aerial bombardment in Germany itself. And to these must be added, for my purpose here, the hundreds of thousands of prisoners in Russia, whom Russia is quite likely to keep these for some years to reconstruct part at least of what they and other German soldiers have destroyed. I should not expect the grand total to be less than four millions, and it may well be more. What will this mean in widows, or wives without husbands, to be supported for years or decades by the State? The financial burden it must involve, added to war pensions of other kinds, will be formidable for a country utterly impoverished by the war it has chosen to make. And what will the effect of the existence of this million or more of women once married but now without husbands, and women with an immensely diminished chance of ever finding husbands, have on Germany's population prospect! For some time, at any rate, she will have little ground for co plaining of overcrowding, even if she experiences a considera influx from places like East Prussia or Sudetenland.
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