Betty B.
speaker
3,598 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Betty B.’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In the first place, the devastated country runs through northern France, from the North Sea to the Rhine, reaching south almost to Paris.
It comprises 6,000 square miles.
it is one-sixth as big as indiana and two-thirds the size of massachusetts it embraces ten of the richest departments or states of the republic of france and one-thirty-sixth of its territory divide france into fields of thirty-six acres each and one acre in every field was fought over collect all its people and one in every six lived in this battle-scarred region and that sixth paid more than sixteen per cent of the taxes
The actual number was about twice as many people as there are in Philadelphia, or as many as there are in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland combined.
To appreciate how dense was the population of this area, let us compare it with that of Indiana, which contains less than 3 million Hoosiers.
You could multiply its population by 9, and it would still be less thickly settled than was this section before destruction fell upon it like a thunderbolt from the skies.
We have more people to the acre in Rhode Island than in any other part of the Union.
There are 600 for every square mile.
These 10 departments had 800 per square mile, which equals a family of five for every four acres.
And that notwithstanding the fact that there are, in our sense of the word, no large cities or towns.
Four of the states or departments were almost as busy as the region around Pittsburgh.
They were beehives of factories and foundries,
of steel works and glass works and great textile mills from under their surface came ninety per cent of the iron ore and more than half of all the coal produced by france they made more than three-fourths of the pig iron in the whole of the devastated region not one-tenth as big as missouri there were eleven thousand factories out of which came ninety-five per cent of the woolen goods and sixty per cent of the cottons which france made for export and domestic consumption
This region produced also seven-tenths of the beet sugar consumed by the people.
It had more than 25,000 industrial establishments, representing one-third of the wealth of the French.
In the mills, about 900,000 men were at work, and 150,000 men were employed in the mines.
Several hundred thousand were engaged in spinning and weaving.
Now look at the conditions just after the armistice, when France began to count up its losses.
When the Germans left, the population of the ten departments had so shrunk that there were only two out of every five people left.
Take two out of every family in Boston, Washington, Cincinnati, St.
Showing 321–340 of 3,598 · page 17 of 180
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