said that the brunt of the losses was borne by the workers and the peasants.
In the great centres of the warring States we can find whole communities of those who have been crippled and monstrously mutilated; men whose faces have been shot away, wearing masks, sit in misery as living tokens to the delights of bourgeois civilisation.
The proletariat, however, was not simply massacred at the front. In addition, intolerable burdens were laid upon the shoulders of those who remained alive. The war necessitated a frenzied expenditure. At the very time when the factory owners were piling up immense profits which became distinctively known as “war profits,” the workers were being subjected to heavy taxation for war purposes. The cost of the war continued to increase beyond measure. In the autumn of 1919, at the peace conference, the French minister for finance declared that the war had cost the belligerents more than a trillion francs. The significance of such figures is far from easy to grasp. In