Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/166

 was, of course, the basis of Belgian prosperity. In her black country, the "borinage" centred on Mons. She employed 150,000 miners, raised 24,000,000 tons of coal per annum, and consumed almost that quantity in her factories and homes. I have an eerie recollection of climbing the belfry of Mons some years ago, and picking out, or persuading myself that I had succeeded in picking out, the battlefields about it: Malplaquet, Jemappes, Fontenoy, Ligny. A Frenchman on the same errand asked dreamily: "When will there be another?" Alas! we can answer that question now: the "borinage" has taken another full draught of Irish blood.

This precious natural possession of coal Belgium certainly utilises to the full. Her mining country, unhappily, had all the sordor that seems inseparable from that enterprise. Mons had an admirable School of Commerce and Industry. Its watchword was expansion and expatriation. The device may sound strange in our ears; what it means to convey, of course, is that Belgium must find markets abroad. She trains her sons not to be lost to her, but to go abroad and open new fields of conquest for her industries. There was also an unusual dispensary which treated the miners for an endemic complaint called "miner's worm," or more learnedly, ankylostomiasis.

The metal industries, of course, centre on Liége. There was no more wonderful sight, not in Pitts