The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses from as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from Brussels.  They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain ranges of waste, and they mined in the debris mounds for souvenirs.  Altogether, I suppose some of them regarded it as a kind of picnic.  Personally I should rather go to a morgue for a picnic than to Louvain as it looks to-day.  I tried hard, both in Germany among the German soldiers and in Belgium among the Belgians, to get at the truth about Louvain.  The Germans said the outbreak was planned, and that firing broke out at a given signal in various quarters of the town; that, from windows and basements and roofs, bullets rained on them; and that the fighting continued until they had smoked the last of the inhabitants from their houses with fire and put them to death as they fled.  The Belgians proclaimed just as stoutly that, mistaking an on marching regiment for enemies, the Germans fired on their own people; and then, in rage at having committed such an error and to cover it up, they turned on the townspeople and mixed massacre with pillaging and burning for the better part of a night and a day.

I could, I think, sense something of the viewpoint of each.  To the Belgian, a German in his home or in his town was no more than an armed housebreaker.  What did he care for the code of war?  He was not responsible for the war.  He had no share in framing the code.  He took his gun, and when the chance came he fired—–­and fired to kill.  Perhaps, at first, he did not know that by that same act he forfeited his life and sacrificed his home and jeopardized the lives and homes of all his neighbors.  Perhaps in the blind fury of the moment he did not much care.

Take the German soldier:  He had proved he was ready to meet his enemy in the open and to fight him there.  When his comrade fell at his side, struck down by an unseen, skulking foe, who lurked behind a hedge or a chimney, he saw red and he did red deeds.  That in his reprisals he went farther than some might have gone under similar conditions is rather to have been expected.  In point of organization, in discipline, and in the enactment of a terribly stern, terribly deadly course of conduct for just such emergencies, his masters had gone farther than the heads of any modern army ever went before.  You see, all the laboriously built-up ethics of civilized peace came into direct conflict with the bloody ethics of war, which are never civilized, and which frequently are born in the instant and molded on the instant to suit the purposes of those who create them.  And Louvain is perhaps the most finished and perfect example we have in this world to-day to show the consequences of such a clash.