RUINED BELGIAN FACTORIES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 2003, 15 July 1919, Page 1

RUINED BELGIAN FACTORIES.

Everyone in tlie industrial world knows by now of the crimes Committed by Germany’s systematic organisation for destruction, writes Mr L. Greiner, in describing in Engineering the devastation in Belgium. Many visitors to our ravaged country have been able to see ouv blast furnaces ransacked and demolished; our powerful motors reduced to fragments, nothing remaining of them but their shorn and twisted foundation bolts; our workshops destroyed; our rolling-mills, with only I heir sites remaining, covered with a chaotic collection of debris, a mass of twisted scrap and demolished machinery. When it is remembered that this work of destruction was carried out by metallurgists, executed coldly under the orders of engineers and professors of universities, who knew, better perhaps than anyone else, the destruction they were accomplishing, when we contemplate these accumulated ruins, despite our constant and continuous expei’icnce during those 51 long months of warfare, one feels stupefied at beholding this magnificent testimonial to German “kullur.” The facts demonstrate conclusively that, if the recovery of raw material was (he avowed object, this object was none the less often only a pretext. Why should the most vital parts of our plant have been selected for destruction'? Why should not, for instance, a single plant: have been destroyed entirely for the recovery of the maximum of its materials instead of simply being mutilated and stripped of whatever was easiest to remove? Why undertake the work of devastation throughout every corner of the works simultaneously? Why were the thousands of tons of loose machinery, stores of scrap, not only distributed over the whole country, but found in the works themselves, spared in favour of reducing to scrap motors and power-houses, blowing-engines and xmlling-mills, the demolition of which was ten times as costly and difficult, or the desti’uetion of a blast-furnace or a reheating furnace whose frameworks represent but an insignificant proportion of"material and value as compared with the cost of the furnace itself ? It is therefore perfectly certain that one of the chief objects pursued was to suppress future erabai’rassing competition, to disable for a long period to come a rival whose energy was dreaded, and to-create a market for German enterprise which the Germans imagined they would be allowed to occupy after the war.