494 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
the political unification of Germany and Italy under the auspices of the
military-minded Houses of Hohenzollern and Savoy in the course of
the fifty-six years following the close of the Napoleonic Wars had
militarized Western Christian populations—in Tuscany, Saxony, the
former city-states of Frankfurt-am-Main, Bremen, Hamburg, and
Liibeck, and elsewhere—which had long since become unaccustomed
to bearing arms. The last members of Western Christendom to hold out
against the twentieth-century Franco-Prussian institution of compulsory
universal military service had been the English-speaking peoples; but in
the United States 'the draft' had been introduced and enforced on both
sides in the Civil War of A.D. 1861-5; in Australia and New Zealand
compulsory military service had been adopted in A.D. 1909, albeit
reluctantly and, as it turned out, only temporarily,1 by two overseas
Western peoples who had come to fear that their thinly populated terri-
tories might be coveted today, and appropriated tomorrow, by the con-
gested populations of Eastern Asia; and an institution which the United
States had found herself constrained to revive, and Great Britain to
introduce, ad hoc in the two first world wars had been retained in both
countries after the Second World War when the World had found itself
in a twilight state that was neither war nor peace as these had been
known in the past. Yet a still rising institutional tide of militarization
had hardly begun to reach the English-speaking peoples before the
psychological tide of martial-mindedness had begun to ebb in France.
The French psyche was, indeed, a psychological barometer on which
the readings at successive dates of Western history since A.D. 1494 had
been apt to give accurate forecasts of imminent rises and falls in the
strength of martial feeling in the Western World as a whole. The pro-
gressive militarization of Western Christendom in the course of the four
centuries beginning with a French King Charles VIII's invasion of Italy
had been registered in the French people's change of mood from the
peaceableness (perhaps due to their still lively memories of their suffer-
ings in the Hundred Years War) that had been characteristic of a
majority of the French people in the first chapter of this tragic story to
the chauvinism that had come to be characteristic of a majority of them
by the Napoleonic Age. This adventitious aggressive spirit in France
had not been blunted by the horrors of the Grand Army's retreat from
Moscow in A.D. 1812 or by the experience of fighting on French soil in
A.D. 1814 or even by the humiliatingly decisive defeat, at Waterloo in
A.D. 1815, of a light-hearted attempt to reverse the military decision of
the preceding year. Thereafter, the French had still had in them the
spirit to seek psychological compensation for the loss of an abortive
Napoleonic French empire in Europe by embarking in A.D. 1830 on the
arduous aggressive military enterprise of conquering a substitute-empire
in North-West Africa; and a French aggressiveness which had thus sur-
vived a chastisement with whips at Waterloo had required the sharper
sting of a chastisement with scorpions at Sedan to make it wince and
wilt. The nemesis of a Napoleon Fs militarism had not deterred French-

* Compulsion \ras suspended in Australia in A.D. 1929 and in New Zealand in A.D.
1930.