SALVAGE FROM THE WAR

Waikato Times, Volume 91, Issue 14133, 9 August 1919, Page 10

SALVAGE FROM THE WAR

GREATEST JUMBLE SALE ON i RECORD. (Daily Express Special Correspondent.) CHARLEROI (Belgium.) Blucher, who was so moved to ecstasy at the thought of London's possibilities in the way of loot, would have exhausted his stock of Teutonic if he could have seen the colossal booty captured by the British forces in Belgium and France, now at the disposal of the world's buyers. Belgium resembles a vast marine, store, from which the British Army is ready to sell you anything from a shovel to a complete light railway ystem, from a pair of old boots to a barge-load of sandbags. It is the most comprehensive, and certainly the greatest, sale on record.

When the German armies evacuated Belgium and the occupied districts of France they were compelled to leave behind them thousands of railway trucks and hundreds of barges loaded up to the brim with every conceivable kind of loot and army stores. This has been concentrated at various, dumps, where the work of unloading and sorting is being carried out by German; prisoners. There are cases of nails and bolts, camouflage material by the acre, harness, pontoons, narrow-gauge railway track and vehicles, barge loads of leather and metal scraps, trucks full of stoves, mounds of sandbags as big as haystacks, trench periscopes, gas alarms which can be heard half a dozen miles away, motor car parts, picks, shovels, spades, and every kind of iron ware, miles of barbed wire, bayonets and belts, domestic utensils, steam and electric gauges, dynamos and motors, lanterns and trench nightlights. Worth £250,000,000.

According to international law all this material, the value of which may run to anything up to £250,000.000, belongs to Britain. The British Government has, however, agreed that all property, whether private or industrial, whose ownership can be proved is to revert to the original possessors without payment. When all the work of restitution has been finished, however, there, will remain properly to I the value of tens of millions sterling, all of which is for sale for the benefit of the British taxpayer. A large proportion of the booty consists of goods brought by the enemy from Germany for his own use, ■ and much of this is brand new merchandise which had never been,.unpacked until its capture. To a large extent this comprises articles for which there is a great demand in the European markets to-day. In addition there is surplus British Army material the value of which also runs into millions of pounds. This includes hundreds of miles of railway track laid down for military requirements, hutments sufficient to rehouse a good proportion of the population of the devastated areas—for which purnose they are being temporarily used—horses and mules, cement, corrugated rooflnar. carts, motor-lorries, wire, and the thousand and one adjuncts to a modern campaign.