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
Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, and those cities would be reduced to the condition of this territory at the close of the war.
One thousand communes, or counties, had been completely desolated, and two thousand more had suffered great damage.
Out of the whole, only 374 were left intact.
In some of the departments, not a single village was spared, and in the four principal ones, 290,000 houses were completely demolished, 164,000 torn by projectiles, and more than a quarter of a million seriously injured in one way or another.
One of the great calamities was the ruin of the water supply.
These French villages relied largely on wells,
or hydrants on the corners of the streets there is no running water in the home of the average french peasant he goes to the village well or to the hydrant to get the water he drinks and uses in cooking i have seen men women and children drawing water in every town i have passed through in the devastated regions about thirty thousand wells had been totally destroyed over twenty five thousand had been poisoned and more than one hundred thousand had to be cleaned up in addition it was necessary
to clean out 5,000 acres of ponds and so many streams that if they were joined together, they would fill a canal longer than the distance from Kansas City to Paris.
Thousands of acres of farmlands were entangled in a network of barbed wire.
Vast areas which had been plowed up by shells were as hilly as a prairie dog village, and other tracks had holes so big that each would make a grave for an elephant.
The mass of earth thrown out would equal the cubic contents
of our national capital at Washington.
About 8 million acres of land, two-thirds of which had been under the plow, were thought to be ruined.
A huge territory had been sown with projectiles, some of them live shells which blew up and killed so many children who played about in the fields that when the work of reconstruction began, the little ones had to be guarded and kept away from the workers.
The dugouts and the trenches formed a great network that had to be filled.
There were 333 million cubic meters of these, enough to equal a ditch a yard wide, a yard deep, and more than 240,000 miles long.
If old Mother Earth had a waste belt of dry land, you might have dug a ditch around her, three feet wide and six feet deep, and the work of filling that ditch would be just about one-fourth that of filling the dugouts left here in France.
As to the roads, most of which had been in as good condition
as the best tourist routes of new england there were so many destroyed that joined together they would have made ten automobile highways from new york to seattle on these roads about five thousand bridges and viaducts were torn down and broken up and of the magnificent trees lining the highways vast numbers were cut off by shells chopped down with the axe or so battered that they looked like the dead forest in the dismal swamp of virginia
The same sort of destruction befell the railways.
Showing 341–360 of 3,598 · page 18 of 180
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