ly the people who have
returned to the devastated villages but also the troops at
the front.

* * * * *

A nation that is worn out and bled white has no colonies, or, if she
has, these same colonies are likewise bloodless and worn out. The
French colonial empire remains intact while the German colonial empire
has disappeared from the face of the earth. The support the colonies
brought to the mother country is wonderful and deserves a separate
study on its own account.

Here is the picture the celebrated German colonial empire offers.

In 1914 Germany possessed a colonial empire two million square
kilometers in area. It represented approximately four times the area
of the German Empire, and before the war its exports amounted to about
one hundred millions of francs or twenty-five millions of dollars.
There were German Southwest Africa, 35,000 square kilometers in
extent, with 1,750 kilometers of railroads, with its copper and
diamond mines, its metals which were worth commercially thirty-seven
millions of marks in 1911; German East Africa, twice as big as the
German Empire, having 1,225 kilometers of railroads, with its harbors
where nine hundred and thirty-three merchant ships had touched in
1911; German New Guinea, as large as two-thirds of Prussia, with its
rich deposits of gold and coal, its maritime commerce of 240,000 tons;
the Samoan Islands, one single port of which, Apia, was visited by one
hundred and ten steamers in a year; Tsing-Tao which, in 1911, had
exported 32,500,000 marks' worth of merchandise, whose maritime
interest was represented by five hundred and ninety steamers which
carried a million tons of freight. All that has fallen away; all that
is actually in the hands of the Allies.

The conquest was difficult; it was finished only in 1916. An order of
the day of General Aymerich, commander-in-chief of the troops which
conquered Kameroon, points with brief eloquence to some of the
difficulties which have been overcome:

Officers, Europeans and troops who are natives of Africa and
Belgian Congo.

At the cost of hardship and unheard-of efforts, you have
just wrenched from the Germans one of their best and richest
colonies.

Followed without a minute's respite from possession to
possession, the enemy has been obliged to abandon the last
bit of Kameroon. For eighteen months you have experienced
the torrid heat of