The German people deserved punishment for their share in the guilt of war. They had been punished by frightful losses of life, by a multitude of cripples, by the ruin of their Empire. When they told me of their hunger I could not forget the hungry wives and children of France and Belgium, who had been captives in their own land behind German lines, nor our prisoners who had been starved, until many of them died. When I walked through German villages and pitied the women who yearned for their men, still prisoners in our hands, nearly a year after the armistice, and long after peace (a cruelty which shamed us, I think), I remembered hundreds of French villages broken into dust by German gunfire, burned by incendiary shells, and that vast desert of the battlefields in France and Belgium which never in our time will regain its life as a place of human habitation. When Germans said, “Our industry is ruined,” “Our trade is killed,” I thought of the factories in Lille and many towns from which all machinery had been taken or in which all machinery had been broken. I thought of the thousand crimes of their war, the agony of millions of people upon whose liberties they had trampled and upon whose necks they had imposed a brutal yoke.