CHAPTER III
SECOND YPRES
So the nations went to war, armed to the teeth, ready as nations never were before. It was to be a supreme struggle; all intelligent Europe knew that. Every available ounce of national resource, human material and energy was necessary to victory. If the rest did not understand, Germany soon taught them. And from the beginning, the “code of civilized warfare” began to melt away. In the first week, Great Britain and Germany both violated its spirit if not its letter. It was provided in the code that when siege was laid to a city the non-combatants must have a chance to get away in order to escape starvation as well as bombardment. With her dominant navy, England at once put a food-blockade on Germany. She knew that Germany produced but 80 per cent of her own food; and that this was done only through intensive fertilization and the employment in harvest and plowing time of a million and a half Russian laborers. The state of war would reduce the supply of fertilizers, would cut off the Russian laborers, would take from the land most of the domestic laborers. It was possible, other means
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