MURDERED INDUSTRIES OF FRANCE

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 144, 13 March 1919, Page 5

MURDERED INDUSTRIES OF FRANCE

COAL MINES IN THE WAR ZONE THE TRAGEDY OF LENS (By the Special Correspondent of the "Horning Post.") The industrial system of France is governed by its coal mines. In the mam they lie close together, in the Pas de Calais, in the Bas-Boulonnais, and in the Department of tho North-making beforo the war a rioh and flourishing group of | towns and villages, connected by, a wonderful system of canals, railways, and etone-paved roads with the ehief centres of consumption. Compared with the German coalfields, those of Northern ; France were small, yet 60 well were, u ey organised that the mining companies of tho Pas de Calais competed successfully 1 with the mines- of the Euhr and the : Sarre. In the twenty years before the • : war the production of tne las de Calais had more than doubled; in 1911 it amounted to 19,500,000 and in 1912 to 21,000,000 tons, an increase of 7 per cent. ' in a single year; and it supported a sturdy population of 94,000 workers, of whom 72,000 ivero miners and 22,000 worked above ground. The neighbouring coalfield of the North was smaller; in 1912 it produced 1 million tons and employed 33,000, workers, of whom 24,000 were . miners. , ■ ; , T This industry bad its centre at Lens, a considerable town of between thirty and fortv thousand inhabitants—not grimy and" ugly as our mining towns are apt ( to be in'Bugland, but pleasantly situated , in its valley and handsomely built and j famous for its gardens, in which the mm- j era took a pride. It was known in Nor- . them Franco as the garden city of the ; miners. . , , . • ' When the Germans invaded this region £ they either occupied or brought under fire the richest of these mines, and , stopped at a blow the production of 20 million tons a year, which is to say half the total coal production of France. The direotors and miners of the pits - that remained in French hands worked ( like heroes, often under shell-hre, to ; make good the loss;,the working dsy was from eight to nine lours; in the space of two years they increased their production by 50 per C' nt, and some of them even doubled their pre- ( war records. ' ■ , , As for the greater par,t of the coalfields, which remained in German hands, thfy have been systematically and tie- ( liberately destroyed. . , ] The destruction-it is important to reI member—was not only the destruction of I tV battlefield. It was also the destrucj (ion of the economic war waged by the ! Germans upon French industry. Systematic Wrecking. 1 went through the coalfields from Be- 1 thune to Douai, and so much was plain e\-en to my cursory inspection. For example at one pithead all the main supports of the superstructure had been separately broken at the same height from the' ground. It was quite evidently done not by shell-fire, but by an ex- ' pert wrecker. Outside the range .of severe fire 1 saw pitheads where the boilers, pumps, lifts, cauldrons, powerhouses, and engines were reduced to ti { mass of inextricable ruin and confusion. The Germans have also been at pains j to drewn the mines, and to fill up tho c shafts. Near Lens they turned the little j River Souchez into the pits; for part of its course the river has disappeared and flows through the shafts and galleries of tho mines. • • At Courrieres, according to tho French official report,, all the superstructure, buildings, ,and machinery have been destroyed by deliberate explosions. And, again, the report says; "Dans je groupe ] da Pas-des-Calais, a Lens, a Lieviu, lis 1 ont detruit sans aucune necessite mili- j tnire toutes les installations exterieures, j chevalcments,' ateliers', machines, que j Taction do Partillerio avait eparques. t Les chaudieres sont etwees, ou emportees, ' les cites ouvrieres aneanties, les mines elles-mems sont entirement noyees." J And so also in the eastern part, of the J coalfields, tiio region between Valencie.'ines and Douai, which for four years ? was in German occupation. There, at all events, the destruction was not by the accident of battle. It is true that there h«,s not vet been time to make a com- !■ piete report on the subject, but so far J as the examination has gone it shows j ' that there, as elsewhere, the Germans did all in their power to destroy the industry. ,-They could not take away the 5 coal;'but'they could and did either take away or destroy tho mechanism of the in- 6 dustrv. l'n the opinion of experts it will take two years before even the less damaged mines can begin to produce, and it will take five' years to bring most of the pits into anything like working order. The work of sixty years lias been destroyed in four—and cannot be restored without infinite labour and enormous expense.. , Such is tho state to which the Germans ] ' have reduced the French coal industry. , Thev have done it deliberately as part of their economic war, so that German coal might have a market in Franco. Consider the crime! The 1 Germans deliberately destroyed the. industry which gave to France its heat, ■' and light, and power. They decreed that the •hearths of a million homes should have 'no fire; they designed that factories . should go idle for want of steam. It was within their .purpose that a. hundred ] thousand miners should be robbed of their living, and that Northern France should for a period of years be without the coal which is the life of her industry. Among the Ruins. Lens was onco a happy and prosperous town. Now to go down into the valley of Lens is like a descent into hell. , is such destruction as none can imagine who has not seen it. In its outer fringes there are stiU the semblance of houses, , roofless and shattered, but still recognisable as. siwh. As you go down the hill chaoq encroaches more and more upon order until at last not even walls remain nor the semblance even of streets—nothing, nothing at all,- but broken rubble and splintered timber in a welter of confusion and ruin. At the bottom of the hill there ia a small open oval, clean' of rubbish. It is what was tho Grande Place of Lens, but it now' looks like a pieee of level ground at the bottom of aj quarry. A piece of the wall of the Mairie—a massive, jagged tooth of masonry, fifteen feet or 60 m height—is the only recognisable thing in sight. Here in this centre of ruin we came upon a group at once ■ odd and tragic; It consisted of two horses and a can't, drawn up near a deep and narrow hole, like a shaft leading into a mine. A stout old French lady, all muffled up in 1 woollen wraps, was kneeling beside the hole and taking various artich's of wreckage out of the hands of some worker ' below. Sometimes a charred pieee cf ' furniture would bo pushed up, sometimes an old illustrated magazine, and again the fragments of a handsome ormolu and alabaster clock. The lady I ed to be the wife of a banker, whose bank had been on the Grande Place of Lensi; the hole lod down into what wore the cellars of the bank, where she had left, her papers and worldly gear; she and her daughter liad come in the cart to recover what remained, aud at tho moment of ouir passing the daughter was down in the hole scraping out the miserable remnants, of their household goods. ' Not even the celkirs of Lens are left, to ' (lie peoplo of Lens. Not even the shafts and galleries of their mines are left to ' the miners of the Pas de Calais. i