On the evening previous Van Hee had gone over to his office to lock up preparatory to our early start for Brussels.  A woman of Louvain stood on the doorstep.  How on earth she had ever got back to Ghent, neither Van Hee nor Luther, who was in Van Hee’s office and who told me the story, could make out from her incoherent words.  She had been torn from her family, driven from house and home with a mob of wretched women, and shipped into Cologne, Germany.  She was almost starved; several others went mad for lack of water.  She now believed herself a widow.  Between tears and hysterics she told how soldiers had entered her house, how two of them had held her husband against the wall at the point of a revolver, while “several” others in succession violated her before her husband’s eyes!!

These stories are not pleasant.  But in seeking the real facts one cannot work with kid gloves.  Of the hundreds I have heard I have mentioned a few of those which show the kind of thing believed to have occurred in the ravaged country.  Of all those which I heard, the last mentioned and the one at the head of this chapter—­for which there was justification—­appeared to have the greatest probability of truth.

During the first rush of war the German system of destruction, and the doctrine of “awfulness,” as I saw it applied to physical objects, was barbaric, relentless, and totally unjustified.  At Louvain, Aerschot, and Termonde it was at its height.  On the other hand, in the mind of an impartial student of the facts there cannot be the slightest doubt that at Louvain there was an organized attack on the invaders by snipers and franc-tireurs armed with knives, guns, revolvers of every description.  A half-day spent en route from burning Antwerp with a Jesuit priest of Louvain and the testimony of several villagers would have convinced me of this, had I not already been convinced by the stories of other survivors.

The burning of villages is one matter, the outraging and torturing of women and children another.  The truth of the former should not in any way convict a German officer, much less Private Johann Schmidt, of unprovoked personal cruelty.

There undoubtedly were, though I did not happen to see them, numerous cases of unprovoked cruelty and other evidences of barbarity that are bound to happen in any war of invasion.  The fact that I, personally, did not happen to see them, and have found scarcely a non-partisan observer who did, is neither here nor there.  I merely state the fact as one of the many bits of evidence which should be taken into consideration.  I have no case for Prussian militarism in so far as applied to inanimate objects.  The German system of destruction in the early part of the war was utterly without excuse or justification; the wreck and desolation, the hunger and suffering of the larger portion of Belgium are utterly beyond the comprehension of those who have not been there.  Certainly words cannot convey the impression.  The suffering, particularly during the weeks following the fall of Antwerp, was so awful and on so large a scale that the senses refused to grasp it.  It has been said that in the Civil War Sheridan was commanded, in pushing up the Shenandoah Valley, to leave the countryside in such condition that a crow could not live on it.  A sparrow could not have existed in many parts of Belgium.