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
As I stood in the shaft house, I talked with the director of this great mining company, which, as I have said, formerly furnished one-tenth of all the French coal.
He is a fair type of the men responsible for remaking France.
He is absorbed in pushing the work ahead, and it is only by questions that one learns from him
what was done by the Germans, and what the French are doing now.
France is not a great producer of coal.
Before the war, her output equaled only about 1 15th of our coal production.
It was not 1 6th the output of Germany, nor 1 7th that of Great Britain.
It did not supply all of the domestic need, and something like 24 million tons were annually imported.
Most of the mines were owned by private companies operating on a large scale.
Those invaded by the Germans employed 100,000 workers or as many as those of all the other French mines put together.
The destruction began with the first days of the war and continued up to the armistice.
As soon as the Germans came in, they forbade any measures being taken to drain the mines or protect the workings.
In 1917, they started systematic devastation, which continued until the end of the war.
All the pits were dynamited,
and flooded to such an extent that about one-fifth of the coal production of France was cut off.
The soldiers went from shaft to shaft blowing up the works, and leaving behind not a single engine, boiler, or train.
The electric machinery was taken out, and at the end of three years, the destruction of the Lens mines was practically complete.
Before the Germans left, they set off more explosives and practically destroyed all the coal mining machinery of the invaded territory.
The work of reconstruction began as soon as the French were able to get hold of the region.
The government organized a commission of invaded mines and through a purchasing syndicate placed orders for pumps and electrical machinery to get out the water.
Showing 521–540 of 3,598 · page 27 of 180
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