no THE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE PEACE ch.

will be exhausted by the direct and legitimateclaims which the Allies hold against her, the ques-tion of her contingent liability for her allies becomesacademic. Prudent and honourable statesmanshipwould therefore have given her the benefit of thedoubt, and claimed against her nothing but thedamage she had herself caused.

What, on the above basis of claims, would theaggregate demand amount to ? No figures exist onwhich to base any scientific or exact estimate, andI give my own guess for what it is worth, prefacingit with the following observations.

The amount of the material damage done in theinvaded districts has been the subject of enormous,if natural, exaggeration. A journey through thedevastated areas of France is impressive to the eyeand the imagination beyond description. Duringthe winter of 1918-19, before Nature had cast overthe scene her ameliorating mantle, the horror anddesolation of war was made visible to sight on anextraordinary scale of blasted grandeur. The com-pleteness of the destruction was evident. For mileafter mile nothing was left. No building was habit-able and no field fit for the plough. The samenesswas also striking. One devastated area was exactlylike another—a heap of rubble, a morass of shell-holes, and a tangle of wire; 1 The amount of human

1 To the British observer, one scene, however, stood out distin-guished from the rest—the field of Ypres. In that desolate and ghostlyspot, the natural colour and humours of the landscape and the climate