When they told me
of their hunger I could not forget the hungry wives and children of
France and Belgium, who had been captives in their own land behind
German lines, nor our prisoners who had been starved, until many of
them died. When I walked through German villages and pitied the women
who yearned for their men, still prisoners in our hands, nearly a year
after the armistice, and long after peace (a cruelty which shamed us,
I think), I remembered hundreds of French villages broken into dust by
German gun-fire, burned by incendiary shells, and that vast desert of
the battlefields in France and Belgium which never in our time will
regain its life as a place of human habitation. When Germans said,
"Our industry is ruined," "Our trade is killed," I thought of the
factories in Lille and many towns from which all machinery had been
taken or in which all machinery had been broken. I thought of the
thousand crimes of their war, the agony of millions of people upon
whose liberties they had trampled and upon whose necks they had
imposed a brutal yoke.
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