£600,000,000,

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19219, 9 July 1924, Page 11

£600,000,000,

FRANCE'S DEBT TO BRITAIN. “Tho total amount of money -which this country lout to Franc© in order that tho G-reat War might be prosecuted is in the neighbourhood of £600,000,000,” says the Manchester Guardian. “It is a painfully large sum, and from the indignation which the thought of it arouses among Frenchmen it might almost bo supposed that they were the creditors and wo the debtors who bad no suggestions to ofTen about payment. Perhaps this indignation will he a little eased by the curious discovery, just announced by the Echo do Paris, that a groat deal of that debt is not really owing at all. "If Franco were to have what is popularly described on this side of the Channel as ‘a fair do,' she ought, we are now told, to be able to claim from England a sum of 9,000,000,000 francs, which represents, according to the writer of the Echo de Paris, the amount of damage done to French belongings during the war by British troops and guns. It may be wondered whether the writer, in arriving at this figure, has made any allowance for the damage that was pant for as it occurred. The inhabitants of the Pas de Calais and the Somme had a shrewd eye for damage. 'The British Army,’ it has been said by one writing with knowledge on the Claims Commission of G.11.Q. ‘paid for everything, oven to an orchard tree that an army mule had nibbed at.’ Towards tho end of the war it even paid the octroi duties on food, entering French towns for the use of British troops. “No one, again, can estimate accurately the vast amount of their pay which the British troops disbursed during four and a-halt years to French traders. In all these matters the British Expeditionary Force was a proposition which paid its way. On the subject of damage done by gun fire it seems almost indelicate to comment. It is just a little lob like presenting a bill to the fire brigade for damages done in tho course of saving the bulk of the claimant’s household; a reverent and sympathetic hush in the presence of the distraught appears the more seemly and even the inoro helpful attitude. But it is an interesting example of what happens when finance becomes an aspect of indignation.”