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Show WOULD HUN iGIIES i i j Belgians Urge Curtailment j of German Production ! as Reparation. By CHARLES DAWSON. - (New York Times-Chicago Tribune Cable, . Comright.) I XI EG hi, Dec. 13. This morning 1 vis- ited the great Cockerill plant at Seraing, j near Liege. It is the largest engineering I concern in Belgium, and was founded 100 ' years ago. In normal times it employs 10,000 hands, including nearly 2000 miners, min-ers, for the company extracts coal from j its estate for its own furnaces. i- The area covered by the works is ini-j ini-j mense and tb.e multitude of buitttimra . peeper; t the' appearance tit' a town. Prac-I Prac-I tically all heavy goods that steel and iron j can produce are made there locomotives, I bridges, rails and girders, machine tools, and even cannon. An interesting tiling about Cockerlll's is that raw material is taken in the shape of ore and fashioned into the finished article. Thus the plant was particularly comp.-ctc and of the best I type to convert the crude mtr.cral by the ! Bessemer process into shining rails and dull armored cupolas. A'ow not an Ingot of steel can be made at Cockerill's, for the Germans, with devilish dev-ilish ingenuity, have dismantled the essential es-sential machinery and cither smashed it up or carried it off to Germany. The destruction caused must represent at least $10,000,000. It is melancholy to see the magnificent workshops, which a few years ago were humming with life and activity, now turned Into" a desert and entirely stripped of their machines and tools and with every bit of belting prone.. The blast turn aces, which wcro the pride of Cocker ill's, have been put oul of action by rude, malevolent means. The rolling mills have been cither destroyed de-stroyed or taken away. A favorite method meth-od was tp drop heavy weights on the ma-! ma-! chincry from a rolling crane. !- As one- of the directors explained to me, the Germans deliberately aimed at crippling Belgian industry for several years so as to enable their own mills and factories to capture markets. Belgian Bel-gian opinion declares 1 bat com pensa lion must tie sought in the seizure ol German machines in Germany, as otherwise Belgian Bel-gian production will be hopelessly handicapped handi-capped lor long years. Nor ea n money cover the damage, for there is loss of market while the installation is bcinjj made. MadL'acre was the !M-i method of the Germans; systematic destruction of machinery ma-chinery was that of Hits. |