Monsieur Segotin's Story
they feel the pressure which a roused world was to exert upon them in their turn, that pressure which was to put them at their wits' end to find hands for the driving of their munition factories. They had still plenty of German labour available, and their armies were still well up to strength. They could themselves still both fight and make shells. And so they contented themselves for the time with stripping their captive. Who shall ever say what quantities of goods of every kind went Eastwards over our railways to be swallowed up and lost for ever beyond the frontier? It was such a loot as has never been seen, and, I pray heaven, will never again be seen on this earth. All the robberies of Rome were a bagatelle to it. For Rome had never a land like Belgium to strip, and Rome never possessed the means of transport which Belgium could provide for her spoilers. Yes, when Germany goes to war, she makes no bones about it. She is thorough, thorough. Nothing is in her sight negligible. Machine bands by the mile, engines and machinery of every sort by the thousands of tons, she took; and while she took these, she did not scorn to carry off our pianos and carpets, our bicycles, our pots and our pans, our tables and chairs, the pictures off our walls, the bells out of our churches (the bells she had first silenced), the leaden pipes and roofs of our houses, the jewellery of our women (iron money—her own—she gave for this), and the rubber rings that our babies cut their teeth on. Nothing escaped her, if she thought that she could
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