BELGIUM TO-DAY

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 10284, 20 May 1919, Page 7

BELGIUM TO-DAY

SCENE OF DESOLATION WHY HELP IS WANTED' WITHOUT DELAY. The cable news recently included the following message from Paris: "Poor Belgium cannot threaten the Peace Conference as Italy can. Headed by her King, she merely pleads." M. Vandervelde, one of the Belgian delegates, said: "Belgium has 2,500,000 people receiving State assistance, and 750,000 unemployed.' It is impossible to restart industry without machinery and raw material. We cannot buy this. We have no credit. Only the mines are working. The Belgians plead for the immediate establishment of a, credit by a guarantee thaifc Belgium will get the first £400,000,000 from GermanVs indemnity." King Albert saw all the Conference leaders, and pressed for £100,000,000 now. M. Vandervelde seriously fears Bolshevism in Belgium.

A soldier returning from the occupied parts of Belgium wonders why on earth English people find so muoh to grumble about (writes ' 'An Infantryman" in the "Pall Mali Gazette," At first he tries joking, then expostulation j finally gets sat on, and subsides [into silence. It is rather necessary that these injured folk should try to realise a little how muoh better off they are than less fortunate nations. Belgium in these days is not & gay place. Its spirit has been broken by \ four long years of damnabje oppression; a calculated vicious oppression, meant to destroy' the very life of the people. The whole country has been robbed by the most ruthless in history;. not, perhaps, so utterly and barbarously as Northern Finance, but with a completeness of detail which leaves one gasping. ' And every rail way and track has been completely destroyed with explosives, so that a railway in Belgium is now a. lino of craters and twisted rails.

"Civilisation is transportation," says Kipling; and by destroying its-rail-ways the Boche has paralysed the very life of Belgian civilisation./ No wonder these people, courageous ,as ttiey are, go about with lowered heads. What can the Allies do for them when only that one tottering line to the German frontier really functions, and primitive road transport iB all that remains? You cannot repair thousands of miles of wrecked railways in ten minutes. And it is all very well to say,"nobly: "We will look after Belgium." You can't, with Ghent and Tournai nearly as far from London as Moscow in Peace time. A PEW, PRICES.

j The direct result of this interrupted communication is an enormous rise in prices. In Tournai, for example, the coat of most articles would make the British housekeeper quail. Leaving aside such things as packets of sulphur matches at Ifr .25 cent's as something , fairly normal, the Briton may ask him-self-how he would like topay 2fr apiecefor ordinary candles when there'is little gas, a scanty and capricious supply of eleotric light, and no oil. Soap in tiny tablets cost 85 cents (this was a reduction) ; small cakes, a mouthful oaoh, were 75 cents; coffee, miade probably of roasted aooms, Bfr the kilo;" an ordinary -writing pad, sfir to Bfr. The list might be extended indefinitely except that half the things here considered essential are missing. ; . • Belgium, for pretty well a-month, has' bedi under snow and frost. It is not pleasant to reflect that for fuel the people have practically only coal dust, a little coke, and damp wood. The factories cannot function, because the Boche destroyed its machinery; thesanitary arrangements have gone wrong, with the result that the streets aro'li"--"! '•• : ' ,i "iles of rubbish; and the cafe life, so dear to Continentals, is a shadow of itself, for there is nothing, to drink but infamous beer and poisonous vin ordinaire at seven francs the bottle (all good wine was "requisitioned" by the gentlemen from Prussia). In the villages things are as bad. For fuel, that urgent necessity, they have at least hedges and woods; but fresh meat is practically unobtainable even horse being acquired by the towns. Meat in the villages is practically all tinned transport. Just after the Armistice the Belgian fields and pastures .were a desolate sight., There was not a horse, not a cow, not a sheep to b© seen; scarcely oven an agricultural instrument. Everything had been taken. Now, with some British horses and other stock wrested from the close-fist-ed Boche thieves, a little life has come back to the countryside, only to be arrested by the bitter frost I NOTES FOR GRUMBLERS,

At one village in December a British officer gavo some white bread and cheese and a packet of chocolate to a little boy of five. His mother said it was tho first time in his life that tho child ha<l tasted these things! He called the bread "gateau," because he had been told that cake was like bread, but much better. Theso people were excellent, hard-working, small farmers, quite well-to-do before the war. During the war every ounce of their produce had to bo taken to the Boche Kommandantur under menace of fines ond. imprisonment. Constant interruptions of military police, waving revolvers, had to be endured, and countless petty tyrannies. One woman was fined tor giving a ohild an. apple—the Kommandantur wanted it I To give a crust or a smoke to a British prisoner meant instant imprisonment. Foople in England, living as they do, have the impertinence—there is no other word for it—to grumble and go on strike over their conditions. It seems —after one has seen the quiet philosophy of these despoiled Belgians —grosß aiid vulgar ingratitude for safety and prosperity retained. Do they ever think, these "grousers," how they would have fared with the Boche in England! Hell would have been a jazz in comparison. And—crowning impertinence—wo who have worked helplessly on at this unmerited suffering, much of which is going on at this very moment, are asked by stay-at-home malcontents to feel tragic and sympathetic becauso the Bodies are supposed to bo starving. Lot them starve, as our Allies, and their victims, had to starve. It may let a little humanity into them'.