A special claim on behalf of Belgium was actually included In the Peace Treaty, and was accepted by the German representatives without demur.

To the British observer, one scene, however, stood out distinguished from the rest—the field of Ypres. In that desolate and ghostly spot, the natural color and humors of the landscape and the climate seemed designed to express to the traveler the memories of the ground. A visitor to the salient early in November, 1918, when a few German bodies still added a touch of realism and human horror, and the great struggle was not yet certainly ended, could feel there, as nowhere else, the present outrage of war, and at the same time the tragic and sentimental purification which to the future will in some degree transform its harshness.

These notes, estimated to amount to no less than six thousand million marks, are now a source of embarrassment and great potential loss to the Belgian Government, inasmuch as on their recovery of the country they took them over from their nationals in exchange for Belgian notes at the rate of Fr. 120 = Mk. 1. This rate of exchange, being substantially in excess of the value of the mark-notes at the rate of exchange current at the time (and enormously in excess of the rate to which the mark notes have since fallen, the Belgian franc being now worth more than three marks), was the occasion of the smuggling of mark-notes into Belgium on an enormous scale, to take advantage of the profit obtainable. The Belgian Government took this very imprudent step, partly because they hoped to persuade the Peace Conference to make the redemption of these bank-notes, at the par of exchange, a first charge on German assets. The Peace Conference held, however, that Reparation proper must take precedence of the adjustment of improvident banking transactions effected at an excessive rate of exchange.