Page:The processes of history (IA processesofhisto01tegg).pdf/16

  more acute when we turn to think of the eastern participants. Few of us have any extended firsthand knowledge of Russians, Rumanians, and Serbs, of Turks and Bulgarians, but even the daily recurrence of these names fails to remove the feeling that attaches to them of remoteness and unfamiliarity. Yet further off, in Asia, peoples of a wholly un-European aspect are bearing arms in the same cause—Japanese, Chinese, Annamese; Sikhs, Rajputs, Afghans; Arabs, Kurds, Armenians; Buddhists, Brahmanists, Mohammedans. In what terms, indeed, do we think of the men who hold the Khyber Pass, of those who actually oppose each other when Turks and Russians meet in Persia, of those who carry on a European war in equatorial Africa? At best we comprehend vaguely that similarity of military equipment does not at once bring all these various races to the similitude of Englishmen or Germans. But behind the combatants, as it were, stand other peoples, now in the turmoil forgotten: tribes of furthest Siberia, unsubdued aboriginals of interior China, forest denizens of India, desert dwellers of Australia, peoples whose names are to us but as technical terms of anthropological specialists, peoples whose