I am not going to try to describe Louvain.  Others have done that competently.  The Belgians were approximately correct when they said Louvain had been destroyed.  The Germans were technically right when they said not over twenty per cent of its area had been reduced; but that twenty per cent included practically the whole business district, practically all the better class of homes, the university, the cathedral, the main thoroughfares, the principal hotels and shops and cafes.  The famous town hall alone stood unscathed; it was saved by German soldiers from the common fate of all things about it.  What remained, in historic value and in physical beauty, and even in tangible property value, was much less than what was gone forever.

I sought out the hotel near the station where we had stayed, as enforced guests of the German army, for three days in August.  Its site was a leveled gray mass, sodden, wrecked past all redemption; ruined beyond all thought of salvage.  I looked for the little inn at which we had dined.  Its front wall littered the street and its interior was a jumble of worthlessness.  I wondered again as I had wondered many times before what had become of its proprietor—­the dainty, gentle little woman whose misshapen figure told us she was near the time for her baby.

I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk cafe where we sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation—­August twenty-first, I think, was the date—­and watched the sun go out in eclipse like a copper disk.  We did not know it then, but it was Louvain’s bloody eclipse we saw presaged that day in the suddenly darkened heavens.  Even the lines of the sidewalks were loSt. The road was piled high with broken, fire-smudged masonry.  The building behind was a building no longer.  It was a husk of a house, open to the sky, backless and front-less, and fit only to tumble down in the next high wind.

As we stood before the empty railroad station, in what I veritably believe to be the forlornest spot there is on this earth, a woman in a shawl came whining to sell us postal cards, on which were views of the desolation that was all about us.

“Please buy some pictures,” she said in French.  “My husband is dead.”

“When did he die?” one of us asked.

She blinked, as though trying to remember.

“That night,” she said as though there had never been but one night.  “They killed him then—­that night.”  “Who killed him?” “They did.”

She pointed in the direction of the square fronting the station.  There were German soldiers where she pointed—­both living ones and dead ones.  The dead ones, eighty-odd of them, were buried in two big crosswise trenches, in a circular plot that had once been a bed of ornamental flowers surrounding the monument of some local notable.  The living ones were standing sentry duty at the fence that flanked the railroad tracks beyond.