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Now there were a few of us in German East Africa who had been in the Retreat from Mons and the subsequent advance to the Marne and beyond it to the Aisne. Indelibly engraved upon our minds were the pictures of French chateaux and farmhouses looted by the German troops in their advance and abandoned to us in their retreat.
Other of Mr Bennett's accusations were: that the 21st Lancers, on the way to the front, robbed hen-roosts and stricken villagers; that once in Omdurman the Soudanese troops abandoned discipline, looted, ravished, and murdered the whole night long; that on land and water our cannon and Maxims were deliberately turned upon unarmed flying inhabitants, massacring, without pity, men, women, and children.
He'd studied electronics in books from looted passenger-ship libraries. Within months after arrival on a law-abiding planet, he was able to earn a living in electronics as an honest trade. And that was unsatisfactory. Law-abiding communities were no more thrilling or rewarding than piratical ones. A payday now and then didn't make up for the tedium of labor.
"We are now," he said, "on the very threshold of hell itself; these rooms in here were my scarlet aunt's unholy of unholies. I never let them with the rest of the house, but keep them as a curiosity. I only wish Torrevieja had kept out; as it was, he looted them, as he did the rest of the house, and nothing is left but the walls and ceiling and floor.
Soon I warmed and cursed them crudely and glibly in four languages. On my return I found some looted boiled eggs and captured German Goulasch hot for me. I fed and turned in. This day my kit was left behind with other unnecessary "tackle," to lighten the horses' load. I wish I had known it. The remaining eggs for breakfast delicious.
At the beginning of November, 1899, Ladysmith, containing over 20,000 souls, with 9,800 horses and mules, and 2,500 oxen and a few hundred sheep, was cut off from the outer world, and nothing in the way of supplies was brought in for 119 days, except a few cattle which our guides looted at night from the besieging enemy.
It seemed to be a fixed principle with the soldiers of the first Napoleon to purloin everything of value which was portable in the countries they invaded, and what they could not steal and carry away, with true barbaric instinct they destroyed. Churches, charitable institutions, hospitals, were all alike looted by these French vandals.
Real sporting guns which could be used for no other purpose, and the owner of which was guaranteed by the local police, were returned. In some houses dumps of looted fabrics from other towns were taken possession of, and altogether work for the courts was found for the next two months.
To get a better view, several officer prisoners climbed onto the wall of the half-burned house against which Pierre was leaning. "What crowds! Just look at the crowds!... They've loaded goods even on the cannon! Look there, those are furs!" they exclaimed. "Just see what the blackguards have looted.... There!
Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his cousin's words. He himself had always been a worker and a saver, George always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began, it was he the worker and the saver who would be looted! That was the negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could civilization be built on any other?
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