MUCH publicity has called to life, too much
publicity has destroyed Central Europe for the
English-reading peoples. Prior to the World War
those peoples had a vague notion, founded entirely
on implicit belief in the honesty of mapmakers, that
there were countries called Austria, Hungary,
Roumania; a learned minority cherished schoolday
memories suggesting the potentiality of a land
named Greece, where marble ruins and archæolo-
gists led a dreary sort of symbiotic existence; and it
was recalled of Bohemia that its most interesting
feature was a seaboard which could not be found.
The conflagration of 1914 illuminated, for a mo-
ment, the landscape stretching between the Rhine
and the Black Sea; but the sense of reality thus
evoked was presently wiped out by the vast black
clouds of Propaganda. The lands whose main
artery is the Danube became fixed in one's con-
sciousness as mysterious caverns whence emanated
atrocities, unpronounceable proper names, informa-
tion bureaus, national councils, and pamphlets,
pamphlets, pamphlets, pamphlets. Then followed
the period of self-determination; and before long

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