Ruin And Waste And Devastation

( Originally Published 1915 )

SOME estimates made at the end of 1914 which were as moderate as they are competent, and were the work of M. Henri Masson, advocate in the Appeal Court of Brussels, placed the material damage and devastation caused in Belgium by the German invasion at £220,000,000.

A few weeks later we learned that the Germans themselves estimated this sum at £280,000,000. And there is every reason to suppose that this valuation is nearer the truth than that of M. Masson, for the latter was extremely moderate in his calculations, and our enemies, moreover, were obviously better in-formed than we as to the extent of their depredations.

Since then there has been continuous fighting in Belgium; without let and without mercy the Germans have been killing and destroying.

The Germans have completed the destruction of Ypres and Dixmude and Nieuport; and they have seriously damaged Fumes. The Yser is bordered with ruins (56) ; to a great distance on either side of it farmhouses and cottages, windmills and inns, have been demolished (53) ; certain villages are now no more than heaps of rubbish, with here and there the remains of a wall emerging, and I know of certain splendid château which within were full of works of art, and were surrounded by magnificent parks of which nothing is left today but a few stones in the midst of a great bare plain intersected by trenches.

The Belgians themselves, and the Allies, have been obliged to bombard and destroy. Their aviators often fly over the inteterior of Belgium in order to demolish railways, bridges, and dockyards by means of their bombs. In order to dislodge or annoy the enemy the Allies have bombarded one by one, from the sea, all the large towns upon the Belgian coast, and they have seriously damaged the naval establishment at Zeebrugge, lately created at a cost of millions of francs. Our friends and ourselves are under the cruel necessity of assisting in the destruction of our poor Belgium a cruel but unavoidable necessity, against which we must bravely and stoically harden our hearts. And, alas, the end is not yet !

If we were to estimate this recent havoc, and that caused in our fields by inundation and in our woods and forests by brutal felling; if we were to make a return of the innumerable requisitions which the Germans have not paid for, and of the war contributions and fines which we have been forced to pay them, and also that of all the sums which have been extorted from us under the most varied pretexts, or simply stolen; if we were to estimate the total of the losses caused by the stagnation of business, taking into account the great length of time which will be required to restore it to its former activity; if we were to estimate all this loss and arrive at the total, we should, I am convinced, obtain a figure double that to which the Germans confessed a year ago.

If to this figure we added our military expenditure, which is enormous, and of which very little goes to the country, since we have to obtain our supplies almost exclusively from abroad; if we were to capitalise all that we shall have to pay, for many long years to come, to widows, orphans, cripples, discharged soldiers, and all the victims of this abominable war we should obtain, unless I am greatly mistaken, a sum nearer £800,000,000 than £600,000,000.

And this, of course, supposing that the war were to end shortly, which will certainly not be the case.

This is the sole result, the sole definite achievement of the German activities in Belgium: ruin, waste, and devastation to the tune of perhaps a thousand million pounds !

How, " supermen " though they profess to be, will our enemies ever contrive to indemnify us in full us and all the other victims of their tentacular politics and their demoniac Kultur? For that is how the horrible tragedy will end; the Germans, who asked for it, will have t0 pay the cost. The few lucid thinkers in their midst, the few men (without prefix) whom their temporarily victorious militarism has not completely stupefied, are well aware of this, and are troubled accordingly. One of my Norwegian friends, by no means a man of ordinary calibre, nor one whose memory or sincerity could be regarded as suspect, in-formed me, on returning from a visit to Germany, that a deputy (Socialist, 0f course) had remarked to him, without circumlocution: " We shall lose the game, and it is, at bottom, the best thing that can happen to us (the crushing of Prussian militarism). But how shall we manage to indemnify France and Belgium? If the war were to end now, £1,000,000,000 would scarcely suffice." And that was in April, 1915 !

Be this as it may, they can never restore to us those young men who were our hope, those in the full development of their faculties, those thousands upon thousands of industrious citizens who contributed to the unparalleled prosperity of our country; they will not diminish, neither by millions nor hundreds of mil-lions, the anguish that we have suffered by their death, and by the death of all those women, young girls, growing boys, little children, and old men who were the victims of a delirious Pan-Germanism.

And the works of art destroyed, and the priceless documents; the rarest of books, early first editions, old communal charters--, which were stupidly given to the flames, as so many common " scraps of paper "—where is the human power that can restore them? It would, in any case, he an insult merely to suppose that indemnities in hard cash could console us for their loss.

As for certain of our towns which have been destroyed, neither millions nor hundreds of millions will avail to restore the exquisite charm which only the accumulation of years could ever have given them. Some of them there are that will never again recover that air and those vistas of candid picturesqueness which made them dear to artists, and which, no less than the artistic jewels with which our fathers had so munificently adorned them, made them infinitely precious to us. How rebuild, as they were, Dinant, Vise, certain parts 0f Louvain, Malines, Lierre, Termonde, Ypres (57), Dixmude, or Nieuport? It is not possible! Certain of these little Belgian cities are indeed, alas! as some American observed, " finished."

It is improbable that we shall undertake to rebuild all the monuments destroyed. As for me, in the case of some of them at least I should like to see what is left made secure, and at the foot of these glorious remnants I should like to see a slab of marble, on which would be graven a chronological inscription, very brief, ending with these words :

BURNED BY THE GERMANS.

The__Day of—, 1914 (or 1915).