French retaliation took the form of fining, imprisoning, and deporting Government officials, industrialists, and superintendents and chief engineers of the mines; expelling wholesale customs and railway employees and their families; confiscating state properties in the Rhineland and Ruhr; seizing money in transit to branches of the Reichsbank and found in municipal treasuries and post-office and railway-station tills; requisitioning hotels and restaurants; closing shops; seizing custom-houses; and putting a cordon around the invaded territories. The French military authorities announced that they would issue export licenses and collect the taxes. The German Government forbade manufacturers and operators to apply for these licenses. During the winter and spring business came gradually to a standstill. In the first four months of the Ruhr occupation France and Belgium received less coal and coke than they would have got in a fortnight of normal deliveries. The cost of the occupation was appalling and required the maintenance of a military establishment that grew by leaps and bounds to six times the figure originally planned for. French and Belgian francs fell 25 per cent, while German marks depreciated to one-two thousandth of par and reached almost the vanishing point on foreign exchanges. There was remarkably little bloodshed, and not as great hardship to the Ruhr inhabitants as one would have supposed. But the gulf of hatred separating the peoples was greatly widened, and the Germans seemed to have recovered to a certain extent from their complete abasement of the years succeeding the great defeat. The recovery was of a dangerous kind, however, as it tended to play into the hands of the reactionaries. The Ruhr workmen who never had any too much love for their employers made a hero of Thyssen, and especially of Krupp von Bohlen, who was sentenced by a regimental court martial to fifteen years’ imprisonment for supposed complicity in an attack on French soldiers at the Krupp works in April, in which no French were hurt but thirteen Germans were killed and many wounded.