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
Enough tracks to lay a road from Boston to the Mississippi River were torn up, and after the armistice, 1,500 bridges and tunnels needed rebuilding.
And now just a word as to the factories and mines.
Two-thirds of the coal pits of the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais had been blown up or flooded, and 220 had to be bored over again.
The concessions of Lens, Liévin,
Portrait, Marchand, and Drecourt had been totally ruined.
Most of the power plants had been systematically plundered, and of 200 gas factories, 150 were damaged.
90% of the textile industries, valued at something like $10 million, were wiped out, and glassworks and chemical works to four-fifths that amount were destroyed.
And so I might go on for an hour more, giving you new figures of how France suffered in the war.
The story is one horrible tale of devastation such as the world has not seen since the 17th day of November, along about 2300 BC, when God sent the flood and destroyed every living thing upon earth, excepting the men, birds, beasts, and creeping things corralled in the Ark of Old Noah.
What we are more interested in is the work of recreation.
This has gone on so rapidly that even the French do not realize the enormous changes
that have taken place in the states through which i have toured large parts of the country remind one of the frontier towns of our west which spring up in gold-mine stampedes or oil rushes save that these new buildings of france are substantial and put up to stay one looks far and wide over farms richer than those of the mississippi valley which at this writing are covered with crops far exceeding in their profit per acre anything we know in america
one sees everywhere on the landscapes the red-tiled roofs of farmhouses and of cities and villages the laws prohibit any buildings of wood and all roofs must be of tile slate or steel some of us lie awake all night before we decide to build a new barn france has built more than ten thousand almost in one job and they are all roofed with gray slate or red tiles the lands brought back by the plow are more than one-eighth the size of ohio
and that state has no soil so fat.
The crops are bigger than ever.
The last wheat yield showed an increase of 8 million bushels over that of the previous year.
The oat and hay crops were enormous.
Before the war, there were, in round numbers on the farms overrun by the Germans, about 900,000 cattle and more than half as many horses, donkeys, and mules.
Of sheep and goats, there were almost a million, and the hogs were one-third as many.
Nearly all of these were destroyed or carried away over the Rhine.
Showing 361–380 of 3,598 · page 19 of 180
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