In Europe

authorities never brought up the matter again.
    In the long run, the war was decided not by events along the fronts, but by a slowly shifting balance of economic and technological power. What young Jean Monnet had predicted did indeed come to pass. All participantswere weakened by the struggle. In France, infant mortality rose by one fifth. In England, cases of tuberculosis rose by twenty-five per cent. Yet Germany suffered even more.
    Due to the Allied blockade of all German shipping, the country received far too few staples. The first food riots took place in Berlin in April 1917. In January 1918, a strike by half a million workers closed down the metal and munitions industry. Food rations — 2,000 calories under normal conditions – had been reduced to 1,000. The German arms industry began breaking down, particularly when it came to modern weaponry. In 1918 the Germans had only one quarter of the number of trucks available to the Allies. The ‘land cruiser’, of which Winston Churchill had already dreamed in 1914, a vehicle that could roll right over the trenches ‘and everything in them’, this monstrous ‘tank’, had meanwhile been developed by the Allies into a serious weapon. They had 800 of them. The Germans had ten.
    Illustrative of the mood in Germany was the popular song by the young poet Bertolt Brecht about a soldier who had long since died ‘a hero's death’, but who was exhumed by the doctors and passed the physical ‘because this soldier died before his time’. Then he was made to drink ‘fiery schnapps’, smothered in incense to mask the smell of decay, received a nurse on each arm and ‘a half-naked dame’, the music blared and there the soldier went marching off, ‘with oompah-pah and hurrah’, on his way to another ‘hero's death’.
    In summer 1918, Brecht's soldier also came down with Spanish flu. In early July, Käthe Kollwitz reported that her husband's practice in Berlin was suddenly swamped with more than a hundred cases of influenza. This unknown illness was particularly virulent, and the exhausted continent was struck hard. The outbreak of Spanish flu probably took place all over the world at the same time, but it was in neutral Spain that medical publications first mentioned it; hence its name.
    Few events in the twentieth century were as disastrous for the people of Europe, and at the same time so quickly forgotten. Still, almost every village cemetery today contains the traces of this epidemic; my own father, as a student, caught Spanish flu and barely survived. It is estimated that between forty and a hundred million people died worldwide. It probablyclaimed more lives in Europe than the entire First World War. What is certain is that the wave of influenza was one of the factors that made the Germans break off their final offensive in July 1918, and then lose the war. It was against this background that the struggle took place during the last eighteen months of the conflict.
    In the same month in which Louis Barthas narrowly missed being catapulted to chairman of a soviet of soldiers, the first American troops landed in France in May 1917. The American Congress had hesitated for a long time, but finally lost patience when the Germans torpedoed five American ships in March 1917; war was declared on Germany on 6 April. It remains unclear why President Woodrow Wilson abandoned his attempts to move the Allies and the Central Europeans towards a ‘peace without victory’. The ‘Zimmermann Telegram’, however, may have played a major role. In that telegram, sent to the German ambassador in Mexico on 16 January, 1917, the German minister of foreign affairs, Arthur Zimmermann, announced the launch of a full scale submarine war against the United States. He also proposed the idea of joining with Mexico in a war against America, which would allow the Mexicans, with profuse German support, to retake the territories they had lost in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by the British, decoded and sent to the Americans. After several weeks of hesitation, Zimmermann confessed to an American correspondent that the telegram was not a fake.
    In the eyes of Vera Brittain, the American soldiers looked like ‘Tommies in heaven … so godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army’. The military strategists were less euphoric. It would, they expected, take at least a year to mobilise the