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The Little Book of the War

The Little Book of the War

By:
Eva March Tappan, PHD

The Little Book of the War outlines the events and consequences of World War I, detailing causes, key battles, and the involvement of various nations, including America.

  1. The Spark that exploded the Magazine
    • The Turks and Turkey — The unrest of the Balkan peoples — The Balkan Wars — Serbia — Belgrade — The independence of the Serbians. — The desire of the Balkan peoples to be divided according to their nationalities — Causes of their discontent — The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria at Serajevo — The Austro-Hungarian note and Serbia’s reply — Russia’s resources and wishes — Germany’s aims — The condition of AustriaHungary — The Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente — Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
  2. The Dash toward Paris
    • Attempts to prevent war — Why Germany wished for war — Her feelings toward the Entente countries — Germany’s aims and preparations for war — Declarations of war — Mobilization of German troops — The troubles of American tourists — The Germans violate Luxemburg and Belgium — Belgium’s honor — The “scrap of paper” incident — Why England entered the war — The Germans in Belgium — The dash toward Paris — General Joffre and the battle of the Marne.
  3. “Kitchener’s Mob”
    • Japan and Montenegro join the Allies — – Japan captures Kiao-chau — German aims in Turkey — How Turkey was tricked into the war — The two groups of combatants — How Germans are trained for war — Rapidity of their mobilization — Lord Kitchener creates a volunteer army — His letter — His death — Trenches and trench fighting — Dangers in captured trenches — Pranks of the Irish — The double line of trenches — The Eastern Front — Von Hindenburg’s success — The Russians in Galicia — How Serbia was saved by King Peter — How Germany’s fleet was bottled up — Results of the war at the end of 19 14.
  4. Modern Methods of Warfare
    • Camouflage — Barbed wire — Machine guns — Liquid fire — Poison gas — Hand grenades — Shrapnel — Wire-less telegraphy and the telephone — Tanks — Flying machines and anti-aircraft guns — Work of the aircraft — Submarines — Teleferica — Value in war of mules, horses, pigeons, and dogs — The Blue Star and the Red Star.
  5. The Troubles of the Neutrals
    • “Quiet” times on the Western Front — Attacking a trench — Neuve Chapelle — The Canadians at Ypres — Energy of the French and the English — The duties and! rights of neutrals — England interferes with American trade — Germany’s undersea warfare — American sales of guns and ammunition — Torpedoing of Red Cross ships.
  6. The War in 1915
    • “Frightfulness” — Destruction of the Lusitania — Defeat of the Russians at the Mazurian Lakes — The siege of Przemysl — Retreat of the Russians in Galicia — Fall of Lemberg and Warsaw — The Grand Duke Nicholas sent to the Caucasus — Typhus fever in Serbia — Bulgaria joins the Central Powers — Serbia is overrun — Russia’s geographical difficulties — The plan to capture Constantinople — The Dardanelles and their fortifications — Failure of the fleet — The struggle at Gallipoli — The Allied forces withdraw — Results of the year 191 5.
  7. The War in 1916
    • Failure of the attempt to capture Verdun — Battle of the Somme — Naval battle of Jutland — Portugal and Italy enter the war—” Italia Irredenta ” — San Marino becomes an ally— New “Fronts”— The Turks aim at the Suez ‘ Canal — Massacres of the Armenians — The Grand Duke Nicholas captures Erzerum and Trebizond — The Russians make a successful drive into Galicia — The English surrender to the Turks in Mesopotamia — Bravery of the Italians — Rumania joins the Allies, is overrun by the Central Powers — Montenegro is devastated — Results of the year 1916.
  8. The United States enters the War
    • The United States proclaims her neutrality — German spies — Dishonorable acts of the German Embassy — The crimes of Germany — Submarine warfare — Count von Bernstorff receives his passports — The United States declares war — Democracy — Autocracy — The Government of Germany — Why we are fighting.
  9. The Crumbling of Russia
    • The grievances of the Russian people — Their revolution — Effect upon the war — “America is our ally” — Service of our Navy — Many nations join the Allies — “Spurlos versenkt” — Greece enters the war — Explosion of mines — Armored tanks at Cambrai — The Italians on the Piave — The English capture Bagdad, Beersheba, Gaza, Joppa, and at length enter Jerusalem — History of Jerusalem — Tact of General Allenby — A national home for the Jews — Capture of Jericho — Germany seizes the Ukraine — The allies in Murmansk and Vladivostok — The Czecho-Slovaks — The independence of Siberia — The unconditional surrender of Bulgaria.
  10. The Americans as Helpers
    • Plattsburg — “Intensive training” — “Selective draft” — Soldiers’ and sailors’ insurance — Cantonments — The salute — General Foch in command — Americans as soldiers — Teaching English at the cantonments — Americans struggle with French — Our Navy — How our Government gets money for the war — The Y.M.C.A. — The Knights of Columbus — The Y.M.H.A. — The Red Cross — Its Indian members — The American Fund for French Wounded — The Friends — Work of college boys and college girls — The nurses’ camp at Vassar — The Salvation Army — Boy Scouts — Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls — The Red Star — A war that must be won.

APPENDIX

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CHAPTER VIII. TRYING IT AGAIN

CHAPTER VIII. TRYING IT AGAIN

Do you not think Columbus must have felt very fine as he sailed out of Cadiz Harbor on his second voyage to the West? It was just about a year before, you know, that his feeble fleet of three little ships sailed from Palos port. His hundred sailors hated to go; his friends were few; everybody else said he was crazy; his success was very doubtful. Now, as he stood on the high quarter-deck of his big flag-ship, the Maria Galante, he was a great man. By appointment of his king and queen he was “Admiral of the Ocean Seas” and “Viceroy of the Indies.” He had servants, to do as he directed; he had supreme command over the seventeen ships of his fleet, large and small; fifteen hundred men joyfully crowded his decks, while thousands left at home wished that they might go with him, too. He had soldiers and sailors, horsemen and footmen; his ships were filled with all the things necessary for trading with the Indians and the great merchants of Cathay, and for building the homes of those who wished to live in the lands beyond the sea.

Everything looked so well and everybody was so full of hope and expectation that the Admiral felt that now his fondest dreams were coming to pass and that he was a great man indeed.

This was to be a hunt for gold. And so sure of success was Columbus that he promised the king and queen of Spain, out of the money he should make on this voyage, to, himself pay for the fitting out of a great army of fifty thousand foot soldiers and four thousand horsemen to drive away the pagan Turks who had captured and held possession of the city of Jerusalem and the sepulcher of Christ. For this had been the chief desire, for years and years, of the Christian people of Europe. To accomplish it many brave knights and warriors had fought and failed. But now Columbus was certain he could do it.

So, out into the western ocean sailed the great expedition of the Admiral. He sailed first to the Canary Isles, where he took aboard wood and water and many cattle, sheep and swine. Then, on the seventeenth of October, he steered straight out into the broad Atlantic, and on Sunday, the third of November, he saw the hill-tops of one of the West India Islands that he named Dominica. You can find it on your map of the West Indies.

For days he sailed on, passing island after island, landing on some and giving them names. Some of them were inhabited, some of them were not; some were very large, some were very small. But none of them helped him in any way to find Cathay, so at last he steered toward Hayti (or Hispaniola, as he called it) and the little ship-built fortress of La Navidad, where his forty comrades had been left.

On the twenty-seventh of November, the fleet of the Admiral cast anchor off the solitary fort. It was night. No light was to be seen on the shore; through the darkness nothing could be made out that looked like the walls of the fort. Columbus fired a cannon; then he fired another. The echoes were the only answer. They must be sound sleepers in our fortress there, said the Admiral. At last, over the water he heard the sound of oars—or was it the dip of a paddle? A voice called for the Admiral; but it was not a Spanish voice. The interpreter—who was the only one left of those ten stolen Indians carried by Columbus to Spain—came to the Admiral’s side; by the light of the ship’s lantern they could make out the figure of an Indian in his canoe. He brought presents from his chief. But where are my men at the fort? asked the Admiral. And then the whole sad story was told.

The fort of La Navidad was destroyed; the Spaniards were all dead; the first attempt of Spain to start a colony in the new world was a terrible failure. And for it the Spaniards themselves were to blame.

After Columbus had left them, the forty men in the fort did not do as he told them or as they had solemnly promised. They were lazy; they were rough; they treated the Indians badly; they quarreled among themselves; some of them ran off to live in the woods. Then sickness came; there were two “sides,” each one jealous of the other; the Indians became enemies. A fiery war-chief from the hills, whose name was Caonabo, led the Indians against the white men. The fort and village were surprised, surrounded and destroyed. And the little band of “conquerors”—as the Spaniards loved to call themselves—was itself conquered and killed.

It was a terrible disappointment to Columbus. The men in whom he had trusted had proved false. The gold he had told them to get together they had not even found. His plans had all gone wrong.

But Columbus was not the man to stay defeated. His fort was destroyed, his men were killed, his settlement was a failure. It can’t be helped now, he said. I will try again.

This time he would not only build a fort, he would build a city. He had men and material enough to do this and to do it well. So he set to work.

But the place where he had built from the wreck of the unlucky Santa Maria his unlucky fort of La Navidad did not suit him. It was low, damp and unhealthy. He must find a better place. After looking about for some time he finally selected a place on the northern side of the island. You can find it if you look at the map of Hayti in the West Indies; it is near to Cape Isabella.

He found here a good harbor for ships, a good place on the rocks for a fort, and good land for gardens. Here Columbus laid out his new town, and called it after his friend the queen of Spain, the city of Isabella.

He marked out a central spot for his park or square; around this ran a street, and along this street he built large stone buildings for a storehouse, a church and a house for himself, as governor of the colony. On the side streets were built the houses for the people who were to live in the new town, while on a rocky point with its queer little round tower looking out to sea stood the stone fort to protect the little city. It was the first settlement made by white men in all the great new world of America.

You must know that there are some very wise and very bright people who do not agree to this. They say that nearly five hundred years before Columbus landed, a Norwegian prince or viking, whose name was Leif Ericsson, had built on the banks of the beautiful Charles River, some twelve miles from Boston, a city which he called Norumbega.

But this has not really been proved. It is almost all the fancy of a wise man who has studied it out for himself, and says he believes there was such a city. But he does not really know it as we know of the city of Isabella, and so we must still say that Christopher Columbus really discovered America and built the first fort and the first city on its shores—although he thought he was doing all this in Asia, on the shores of China or Japan.

When Columbus had his people nearly settled in their new city of Isabella, he remembered that the main thing he was sent to do was to get together as much gold as possible. His men were already grumbling. They had come over the sea, they said, not to dig cellars and build huts, but to find gold—gold that should make them rich and great and happy.

So Columbus set to work gold-hunting. At first things seemed to promise success. The Indians told big stories of gold to be found in the mountains of Hayti; the men sent to the mountains discovered signs of gold, and at once Columbus sent home joyful tidings to the king and queen of Spain.

Then he and his men hunted everywhere for the glittering yellow metal. They fished for it in the streams; they dug for it in the earth; they drove the Indians to hunt for it also until the poor redmen learned to hate the very sound of the word gold, and believed that this was all the white men lived for, cared for or worked for; holding up a piece of this hated gold the Indians would say, one to another: “Behold the Christian’s god!” And so it came about that the poor worried natives, who were not used to such hard work, took the easiest way out of it all, and told the Spaniards the biggest kind of lies as to where gold might be found—always away off somewhere else—if only the white men would go there to look for it.

On the thirteenth of January, 1494, Columbus sent back to Spain twelve of his seventeen ships. He did not send back in them to the king, and queen, the gold he had promised. He sent back the letters that promised gold; he sent back as prisoners for punishment some of the most discontented and quarrelsome of his colonists; and, worst of all, he sent to the king and queen a note asking, them to permit him to send to Spain all the Indians he could catch, to be sold as slaves. He said that by doing this they could make “good Christians” of the Indians, while the money that came from selling the natives would buy cattle for the colony and leave some money for the royal money-chests.

It is not pleasant to think this of so great a man as Columbus. But it is true, and he is really the man who, started the slave-trade in America. Of course things were very different in his time from what they are to-day, and people did not think so badly of this horrible business. But some good men did, and spoke out boldly against it. What they said was not of much use, however, and slavery was started in the new world. And from that act of Columbus came much sorrow and trouble for the land he found. Even the great war between the northern and southern sections of our own United States, upon one side or the other of which your fathers, or your grandfathers perhaps, fought with gun and sword, was brought about by this act of the great Admiral Columbus hundreds of years before.

So the twelve ships sailed back to Spain, and Columbus, with his five remaining ships, his soldiers and his colonists, remained in the new city of Isabella to keep up the hunt for gold or to become farmers in the new world.

THE TRUE STORY OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS CALLED THE GREAT ADMIRAL

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The Story of Mankind: The Greek Cities

We modern people love the sound of the word “big.” We pride ourselves upon the fact that we belong to the “biggest” country in the world and possess the “biggest” navy and grow the “biggest” oranges and potatoes, and we love to live in cities of “millions” of inhabitants and when we are dead, we are buried in the “biggest cemetery of the whole state.”

A citizen of ancient Greece, could they have heard us talk, would not have known what we meant. “Moderation in all things” was the ideal of Greek life and mere bulk did not impress them at all. And this love of moderation was not merely a hollow phrase used upon special occasions: it influenced the life of the Greeks from the day of their birth to the hour of their death. It was part of their literature, and it made them build small but perfect temples. It found expression in the clothes and jewelry which the people wore. It followed the crowds that went to the theater and made them hoot down any playwright who dared to sin against the iron law of good taste or good sense.

The Greeks even insisted upon this quality in their politicians and in their most popular athletes. When a powerful runner came to Sparta and boasted that he could stand longer on one foot than any other man in Hellas the people drove him from the city because he prided himself upon an accomplishment at which he could be beaten by any common goose. “That is all very well,” you will say, “and no doubt it is a great virtue to care so much for moderation and perfection, but why should the Greeks have been the only people to develop this quality in olden times?” For an answer I shall point to the way in which the Greeks lived.

The people of Egypt or Mesopotamia had been the “subjects” of a mysterious Supreme Ruler who lived miles and miles away in a dark palace and who was rarely seen by the masses of the population. The Greeks on the other hand, were “free citizens” of a hundred independent little “cities” the largest of which counted fewer inhabitants than a large modern village. When a peasant who lived in Ur said that he was a Babylonian he meant that he was one of millions of other people who paid tribute to the king who at that particular moment happened to be master of western Asia. But when a Greek said proudly that he was an Athenian or a Theban he spoke of a small town, which was both his home and his country, and which recognized no master but the will of the people in the marketplace.

To the Greek, their homeland was the place where they were born; where they had spent their earliest years playing hide and seek amidst the forbidden rocks of the Acropolis; where they had grown into adulthood with a thousand other boys and girls, whose nicknames were as familiar to him as those of your own schoolmates. Their homeland was the holy soil where their father and mother lay buried. It was the small house within the high city walls where their families lived in safety. It was a complete world which covered no more than four or five acres of rocky land. Don’t you see how these surroundings must have influenced people in everything they did and said and thought? The people of Babylon and Assyria and Egypt had been part of a vast mob. They had been lost in the multitude. The Greek on the other hand had never lost touch with their immediate surroundings. They never ceased to be part of a little town where everybody knew everyone else. They felt that their intelligent neighbors were watching them. Whatever they did, whether they wrote plays or made statues out of marble or composed songs, they remembered that their efforts were going to be judged by all the free-born citizens of their hometown who knew about such things. This knowledge forced them to strive after perfection, and perfection, as they had been taught from childhood, was not possible without moderation.

In this hard school, the Greeks learned to excel in many things. They created new forms of government and new forms of literature and new ideals in art which we have never been able to surpass. They performed these miracles in little villages that covered less ground than four or five modern city blocks.

And look, what finally happened!

In the fourth century before our era, Alexander of Macedonia conquered the world. As soon as he had done with fighting, Alexander decided that he must bestow the benefits of the true Greek genius upon all mankind. He took it away from the little cities and the little villages and tried to make it blossom and bear fruit amidst the vast royal residences of his newly acquired Empire. But the Greeks, removed from the familiar sight of their own temples, removed from the well-known sounds and smells of their own crooked streets, at once lost the cheerful joy and the marvelous sense of moderation which had inspired the work of their hands and brains while they labored for the glory of their old city-states. They became cheap artisans, content with second-rate work. The day the little city-states of old Hellas lost their independence and were forced to become part of a big nation, the old Greek spirit died. And it has been dead ever since.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

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The Story of Mankind: The Greeks

The Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several centuries, when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. According to the old myths these were the only two human beings who had escaped the great flood, which countless years before had destroyed all the people of the world, when they had grown so wicked that they disgusted Zeus, the mighty god, who lived on Mount Olympus.

Of these early Hellenes we know nothing. Thucydides, the historian of the fall of Athens, describing his earliest ancestors, said that they “did not amount to very much,” and this was probably true. They were very ill-mannered. They lived like pigs and threw the bodies of their enemies to the wild dogs who guarded their sheep. They had very little respect for other people’s rights, and they killed the natives of the Greek peninsula (who were called the Pelasgians) and stole their farms and took their cattle and made their children slaves and wrote endless songs praising the courage of the clan of the Achaeans, who had led the Hellenic advance-guard into the mountains of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus.

But here and there, on the tops of high rocks, they saw the castles of the Aegeans and those they did not attack for they feared the metal swords and the spears of the Aegean soldiers and knew that they could not hope to defeat them with their clumsy stone axes.

For many centuries they continued to wander from valley to valley and from mountain side to mountain side Then the whole of the land had been occupied and the migration had come to an end.

That moment was the beginning of Greek civilization. The Greeks, living within sight of the Aegean colonies, were finally driven by curiosity to visit their haughty neighbors. They discovered that they could learn many useful things from the people who dwelt behind the high stone walls of Mycenae, and Tiryns.

The Greeks were clever pupils. Within a short time, they mastered the art of handling those strange iron weapons which the Aegeans had brought from Babylon and from Thebes. They came to understand the mysteries of navigation. They began to build little boats for their own use.

And when the Greeks had learned everything the Aegeans could teach them, they turned upon their teachers and drove them back to their islands. Soon afterwards they ventured forth upon the sea and conquered all the cities of the Aegean. Finally, in the fifteenth century before our era, they plundered and ravaged Cnossus and ten centuries after their first appearance upon the scene the Hellenes were the undisputed rulers of Greece, of the Aegean and of the coastal regions of Asia Minor. Troy, the last great commercial stronghold of the older civilization, was destroyed in the eleventh century B.C. European history was to begin in all seriousness.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

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The Story of Mankind: The Aegean Sea

When Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his father told him the story of Troy. He liked that story better than anything else he had ever heard and he made up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave home, he would travel to Greece and “find Troy.” That he was the son of a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did not bother him. He knew that he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first and do the digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get a large fortune within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough money to equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.

In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered with grain fields. According to tradition it had been the home of Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann, whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than his knowledge, wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he began to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried town which was at least a thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had written.

Then something very interesting occurred. If Schliemann had found a few polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects, which people had generally associated with the prehistoric men who had lived in these regions before the coming of the Greeks, Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a pattern that was unknown to the Greeks.

He ventured the suggestion that fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of the Aegean had been inhabited by a mysterious race of people who in many ways had been the superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their civilization or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of originality. And this proved to be the case.

In the late seventies of the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae, ruins which were so old that Roman guide-books marveled at their antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which had been left behind by those mysterious people who had covered the Greek coast with their cities and who had built walls, so big and so heavy and so strong, that the Greeks called them the work of the Titans, those god-like giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with mountain peaks.

A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of the romantic features of the story. The makers of these early works of art and the builders of these strong fortresses were no sorcerers, but simple sailors and traders. They had lived in Crete, and on the many small islands of the Aegean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they had turned the Aegean into a center of commerce for the exchange of goods between the highly civilized east and the slowly developing wilderness of the European mainland.

For more than a thousand years they had maintained an island empire which had developed a very high form of art. Indeed their most important city, Cnossus, on the northern coast of Crete, had been entirely modern in its insistence upon hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly drained and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto unknown bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain and the olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that they had given rise to the story of the “labyrinth,” the name which we give to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is almost impossible to find our way out, once the front door has closed upon our frightened selves.

But what finally became of this great Aegean Empire and what caused its sudden downfall, that I cannot tell.

The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no one has yet been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their history therefore is unknown to us. We have to reconstruct the record of their adventures from the ruins which the Aegeans have left behind. These ruins make it clear that the Aegean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilized race which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe. Unless we are very much mistaken, the savages who were responsible for the destruction of the Cretan and the Aegean civilization were none other than certain tribes of wandering shepherds who had just taken possession of the rocky peninsula between the Adriatic and the Aegean seas and who are known to us as Greeks.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

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The Story of Mankind: The Indo-Europeans

The world of Egypt and Babylon and Assyria and Phoenicia had existed almost thirty centuries, and the venerable races of the Fertile Valley were getting old and tired. Their doom was sealed when a new and more energetic race appeared upon the horizon. We call this race the Indo-European race, because it conquered not only Europe but also made itself the ruling class in the country which is now known as British India.

These Indo-Europeans were Caucasians like the Semites, but they spoke a different language which is regarded as the common ancestor of all European tongues with the exception of Hungarian and Finnish and the Basque dialects of Northern Spain.

When we first hear of them, they had been living along the shores of the Caspian Sea for many centuries. But one day they had packed their tents and they had wandered forth in search of a new home. Some of them had moved into the mountains of Central Asia and for many centuries they had lived among the peaks which surround the plateau of Iran and that is why we call them Aryans. Others had followed the setting sun and they had taken possession of the plains of Europe as I shall tell you when I give you the story of Greece and Rome.

For the moment we must follow the Aryans. Under the leadership of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) who was their great teacher many of them had left their mountain homes to follow the swiftly flowing Indus river on its way to the sea.

Others had preferred to stay among the hills of western Asia and there they had founded the half-independent communities of the Medes and the Persians, two peoples whose names we have copied from the old Greek history-books. In the seventh century before the birth of Christ, the Medes had established a kingdom of their own called Media, but this perished when Cyrus, the chief of a clan known as the Anshan, made himself king of all the Persian tribes and started upon a career of conquest which soon made him and his children the undisputed masters of the whole of western Asia and of Egypt.

Indeed, with such energy did these Indo-European Persians push their triumphant campaigns in the west that they soon found themselves in serious difficulties with certain other Indo-European tribes which centuries before had moved into Europe and had taken possession of the Greek peninsula and the islands of the Aegean Sea.

These difficulties led to the three famous wars between Greece and Persia during which King Darius and King Xerxes of Persia invaded the northern part of the peninsula. They ravaged the lands of the Greeks and tried very hard to get a foothold upon the European continent.

But in this they did not succeed. The navy of Athens proved unconquerable. By cutting off the lines of supplies of the Persian armies, the Greek sailors invariably forced the Asiatic rulers to return to their base.

It was the first encounter between Asia, the ancient teacher, and Europe, the young and eager pupil. A great many of the other chapters of this book will tell you how the struggle between east and west has continued until this very day.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

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The Story of Mankind: The Phoenicians

The Phoenicians, who were the neighbors of the Jews, were a Semitic tribe which at a very early age had settled along the shores of the Mediterranean. They had built themselves two well-fortified towns, Tyre and Sidon, and within a short time they had gained a monopoly of the trade of the western seas. Their ships went regularly to Greece and Italy and Spain, and they even ventured beyond the straits of Gibraltar to visit the Scilly islands where they could buy tin. Wherever they went, they built themselves small trading stations, which they called colonies. Many of these were the origin of modern cities, such as Cadiz and Marseilles.

They bought and sold whatever promised to bring them a good profit. They were not troubled by a conscience. If we are to believe all their neighbors, they did not know what the words honesty or integrity meant. They regarded a well-filled treasure chest the highest ideal of all good citizens. Indeed, they were very unpleasant people and did not have a single friend. Nevertheless, they have rendered all coming generations one service of the greatest possible value. They gave us our alphabet.

The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, invented by the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical businessmen and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters. They set to work and invented a new system of writing which was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptians, and they simplified a number of the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed, and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short and handy alphabet of twenty-two letters.

In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the Aegean Sea and entered Greece. The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy. The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the Sumerians.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

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The Story of Mankind: Moses

Some time during the twentieth century before our era, a small and unimportant tribe of Semitic shepherds had left its old home, which was situated in the land of Ur on the mouth of the Euphrates, and had tried to find new pastures within the domain of the Kings of Babylonia. They had been driven away by the royal soldiers and they had moved westward looking for a little piece of unoccupied territory where they might set up their tents.

This tribe of shepherds was known as the Hebrews or, as we call them, the Jews. They had wandered far and wide, and after many years of dreary peregrinations they had been given shelter in Egypt. For more than five centuries they had dwelt among the Egyptians and when their adopted country had been overrun by the Hyksos marauders (as I told you in the story of Egypt) they had managed to make themselves useful to the foreign invader and had been left in the undisturbed possession of their grazing fields. But after a long war of independence the Egyptians had driven the Hyksos out of the valley of the Nile and then the Jews had come upon evil times for they had been degraded to the rank of common slaves and they had been forced to work on the royal roads and on the Pyramids. And as the frontiers were guarded by the Egyptian soldiers it had been impossible for the Jews to escape.

After many years of suffering they were saved from their miserable fate by a young Jew, called Moses, who for a long time had dwelt in the desert and there had learned to appreciate the simple virtues of his earliest ancestors, who had kept away from cities and city-life and had refused to let themselves be corrupted by the ease and the luxury of a foreign civilization.

Moses decided to bring his people back to a love of the ways of the patriarchs. He succeeded in evading the Egyptian troops that were sent after him and led his fellow tribesmen into the heart of the plain at the foot of Mount Sinai. During his long and lonely life in the desert, he had learned to revere the strength of the great God of the Thunder and the Storm, who ruled the high heavens and upon whom the shepherds depended for life and light and breath. This God, one of the many divinities who were widely worshipped in western Asia, was called Jehovah, and through the teaching of Moses, he became the sole Master of the Hebrew race.

One day, Moses disappeared from the camp of the Jews. It was whispered that he had gone away carrying two tablets of rough-hewn stone. That afternoon, the top of the mountain was lost to sight. The darkness of a terrible storm hid it from the eye of man. But when Moses returned, behold! there stood engraved upon the tablets the words which Jehovah had spoken unto the people of Israel amidst the crash of his thunder and the blinding flashes of his lightning. And from that moment, Jehovah was recognized by all the Jews as the Highest Master of their Fate, their only True God, who had taught them how to live holy lives when he bade them to follow the wise lessons of his Ten Commandments.

They followed Moses when he bade them continue their journey through the desert. They obeyed him when he told them what to eat and drink and what to avoid that they might keep well in the hot climate.


And finally after many years of wandering they came to a land which seemed pleasant and prosperous. It was called Palestine, which means the country of the “Pilistu” the Philistines, a small tribe of Cretans who had settled along the coast after they had been driven away from their own island.

Unfortunately, the mainland, Palestine, was already inhabited by another Semitic race, called the Canaanites. But the Jews forced their way into the valleys and built themselves cities and constructed a mighty temple in a town which they named Jerusalem, the Home of Peace.

As for Moses, he was no longer the leader of his people. He had been allowed to see the mountain ridges of Palestine from afar. Then he had closed his tired eyes for all time. He had worked faithfully and hard to please Jehovah. Not only had he guided his brethren out of foreign slavery into the free and independent life of a new home but he had also made the Jews the first of all nations to worship a single god.

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The Story of Mankind: Lesson 8: The Sumerians

The fifteenth century was an age of great discoveries. Columbus tried to find a way to the island of Kathay and stumbled upon a new and unsuspected continent. An Austrian bishop equipped an expedition which was to travel eastward and find the home of the Grand Duke of Muscovy, a voyage which led to complete failure, for Moscow was not visited by western men until a generation later. Meanwhile a certain Venetian by the name of Barbero had explored the ruins of western Asia and had brought back reports of a most curious language which he had found carved in the rocks of the temples of Shiraz and engraved upon endless pieces of baked clay.

But Europe was busy with many other things and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the first “cuneiform inscriptions” (so-called because the letters were wedge-shaped and wedge is called “Cuneus” in Latin) were brought to Europe by a Danish surveyor, named Niebuhr. Then it took thirty years before a patient German schoolmaster by the name of Grotefend had deciphered the first four letters, the D, the A, the R and the SH, the name of the Persian King Darius. And another twenty years had to go by until a British officer, Henry Rawlinson, who found the famous inscription of Behistun, gave us a workable key to the nail-writing of western Asia.

Compared to the problem of deciphering these nail-writings, the job of Champollion had been an easy one. The Egyptians used pictures. But the Sumerians, the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia, who had hit upon the idea of scratching their words in tablets of clay, had discarded pictures entirely and had evolved a system of V-shaped figures which showed little connection with the pictures out of which they had been developed.

A few examples will show you what I mean. In the beginning a star, when drawn with a nail into a brick looked as follows:
This sign however was too cumbersome and after a short while when the meaning of “heaven” was added to that of star the picture was simplified which made it even more of a puzzle.
In the same way an ox changed from
into
and a fish changed from
into
The sun was originally a plain circle
and became
If we were using the Sumerian script today we would make an
look like
This system of writing down our ideas looks rather complicated but for more than thirty centuries it was used by the Sumerians and the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Persians and all the different races which forced their way into the fertile valley.The story of Mesopotamia is one of endless warfare and conquest. First the Sumerians came from the North. They were a Caucasian people who had lived in the mountains. They had been accustomed to worship their gods on the tops of hills. After they had entered the plain they constructed artificial little hills on top of which they built their altars. They did not know how to build stairs and they therefore surrounded their towers with sloping galleries. Our engineers have borrowed this idea, as you may see in our big railroad stations where ascending galleries lead from one floor to another. We may have borrowed other ideas from the Sumerians but we do not know it.
The Sumerians were entirely absorbed by those races that entered the fertile valley at a later date. Their towers however still stand amidst the ruins of Mesopotamia. The Jews saw them when they went into exile in the land of Babylon and they called them towers of Babillli, or towers of Babel.In the fortieth century before our era, the Sumerians had entered Mesopotamia. They were soon afterwards overpowered by the Akkadians, one of the many tribes from the desert of Arabia who speak a common dialect and who are known as the “Semites,” because in the olden days people believed them to be the direct descendants of Shem, one of the three sons of Noah.A thousand years later, the Akkadians were forced to submit to the rule of the Amorites, another Semitic desert tribe whose great King Hammurabi built himself a magnificent palace in the holy city of Babylon and who gave his people a set of laws which made the Babylonian state the best administered empire of the ancient world.Next the Hittites, whom you will also meet in the Old Testament, over-ran the Fertile Valley and destroyed whatever they could not carry away. They in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert god, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most important capital of that day. Nebuchadnezzar, the best known of their Kings, encouraged the study of science, and our modern knowledge of astronomy and mathematics is all based upon certain first principles which were discovered by the Chaldeans.In the year 538 B.C. a crude tribe of Persian shepherds invaded this old land and overthrew the empire of the Chaldeans. Two hundred years later, they in turn were overthrown by Alexander the Great, who turned the Fertile Valley, the old melting-pot of so many Semitic races, into a Greek province.Next came the Romans and after the Romans, the Turks, and Mesopotamia, the second center of the world’s civilization, became a vast wilderness where huge mounds of earth told a story of ancient glory.

THE STORY OF MANKIND

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THE STORY OF MANKIND

By Hendrik Van Loon, Ph.D.

“The Story of Mankind” by Hendrik Willem Van Loon is a historical account written in the early 20th century. This work aims to present the journey of humanity from prehistoric times through ancient civilizations up to the author’s contemporary era, exploring the significant events, cultures, and figures that have shaped human history. By utilizing vivid imagery and an engaging storytelling style, the author invites readers to reflect on both the challenges faced by humanity and the creative ingenuity that has propelled human advancement. Because this is a Christian website, we skip forward in the book and start a chapter 4. For the full book click here.

  • Alexander the Great
  • Rome and Carthage Part
  • Rome and Carthage Part II
  • The Rise of Rome
  • The Roman Empire Part I
  • The Roman Empire Part II
  • Joshua of Nazareth (Jesus)
  • The Fall of Rome
  • Rise of the Church
  • Mohammed
  • Charlemagne
  • The Norsemen
  • Feudalism
  • Chivalry
  • Pope vs. Emperor
  • The Crusades

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