The amount of the material damage done in the invaded districts has been the subject of enormous, if natural, exaggeration A journey through the devastated areas of France is impressive to the eye and the imagination beyond description.  During the winter of 1918-19, before Nature had cast over the scene her ameliorating mantle, the horror and desolation of war was made visible to sight on an extraordinary scale of blasted grandeur.  The completeness of the destruction was evident.  For mile after mile nothing was left.  No building was habitable and no field fit for the plow.  The sameness was also striking.  One devastated area was exactly like another—­a heap of rubble, a morass of shell-holes, and a tangle of wire.[80] The amount of human labor which would be required to restore such a countryside seemed incalculable; and to the returned traveler any number of milliards of dollars was inadequate to express in matter the destruction thus impressed upon his spirit.  Some Governments for a variety of intelligible reasons have not been ashamed to exploit these feelings a little.

Popular sentiment is most at fault, I think, in the case of Belgium.  In any event Belgium is a small country, and in its case the actual area of devastation is a small proportion of the whole.  The first onrush of the Germans in 1914 did some damage locally; after that the battle-line in Belgium did not sway backwards and forwards, as in France, over a deep belt of country.  It was practically stationary, and hostilities were confined to a small corner of the country, much of which in recent times was backward, poor, and sleepy, and did not include the active industry of the country.  There remains some injury in the small flooded area, the deliberate damage done by the retreating Germans to buildings, plant, and transport, and the loot of machinery, cattle, and other movable property.  But Brussels, Antwerp, and even Ostend are substantially intact, and the great bulk of the land, which is Belgium’s chief wealth, is nearly as well cultivated as before.  The traveler by motor can pass through and from end to end of the devastated area of Belgium almost before he knows it; whereas the destruction in France is on a different kind of scale altogether.  Industrially, the loot has been serious and for the moment paralyzing; but the actual money cost of replacing machinery mounts up slowly, and a few tens of millions would have covered the value of every machine of every possible description that Belgium ever possessed.  Besides, the cold statistician must not overlook the fact that the Belgian people possess the instinct of individual self-protection unusually well developed; and the great mass of German bank-notes[81] held in the country at the date of the Armistice, shows that certain classes of them at least found a way, in spite of all the severities and barbarities of German rule, to profit at the expense of the invader.  Belgian claims against Germany such as I have seen, amounting to a sum in excess of the total estimated pre-war wealth of the whole country, are simply irresponsible.[82]