With the end of the Great War, Britain, Germany and the United States were celebrating victory over their ancient rivals, however, all of them were left wondering whether the cost really had been worth it. Millions of young men had been wiped out and the economic damage was huge. Moreover, the war, as Germany in particular had hoped, did not get rid of the problems the Central Powers faced before the war. The most important was what to do about the 'corpse empires' of Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Turkey had been of little use in the Great War and Austria-Hungary, nothing more than a hindrance. Hindenburg himself commented, "Were it not for that shack of a state that calls itself an Empire, we would have won the war in 1918, maybe even 1917. For the Democrats, the war was a disaster, already