Major Bayer had been one of the foremost German officers to set foot on Belgian soil after the severance of friendly relations between the two countries.  “I believe,” he said, “that I heard the first shot fired in this war.  It came from a clump of trees within half an hour after our advance guard crossed the boundary south of Aachen, and it wounded the leg of a captain who commanded a company of scouts at the head of the column.  Our skirmishers surrounded the woods and beat the thickets, and presently they brought forth the man who had fired the shot.  He was sixty years old, and he was a civilian.  Under the laws of war we shot him on the spot.  So you see probably the first shot fired in this war was fired at us by a franc-tireur.  By his act he had forfeited his life, but personally I felt sorry for him; for I believe, like many of his fellow countrymen who afterward committed such offenses, he was ignorant of the military indefensibility of his attack on us and did not realize what the consequences would be.

“I am sure, though, that the severity with which we punished these offenses at the outset was really merciful, for only by killing the civilians who fired on us, and by burning their houses, could we bring home to thousands of others the lesson that if they wished to fight us they must enlist in their own army and come against us in uniforms, as soldiers.”

Within the same hour we were introduced to Privy Councilor Otto von Falke, an Austrian by birth, but now, after long service in Cologne and Berlin, promoted to be Director of Industrial Arts for Prussia.  He had been sent, he explained, by order of his Kaiser, to superintend the removal of historic works of art from endangered churches and other buildings, and turn them over to the curator of the Royal Belgian Gallery, at Brussels, for storage in the vaults of the museum until such time as peace had been restored and they might be returned with safety to their original positions.

“So you see, gentlemen,” said Professor von Falke, “the Germans are not despoiling Belgium of its wealth of pictures and statues.  We are taking pains to preserve and perpetuate them.  They belong to Belgium—­not to us; and we have no desire to take them away.  Certainly we are not vandals who would wantonly destroy the splendid things of art, as our enemies have claimed.”

He was plainly a sincere man and he was much in love with his work; that, too, was easy to see.  Afterward, though, the thought came to us that, if Belgium was to become a German state by right of seizure and conquest, he was saving these masterpieces of Vandyke and Rubens, not for Belgium, but for the greater glory of the Greater Empire.

However, that was beside the mark.  What at the moment seemed to us of more consequence even than rescuing holy pictures was that all about us were sundry hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who did not need pictures, but food.  You had only to look at them in the streets to know that their bellies felt the grind of hunger.  Famine knocked at half the doors in that city of Brussels, and we sat in the glittering cafe of the Palace Hotel and talked of pictures!