The destruction of the town was extraordinarily complete, and evidently carefully organized.  The whole thing had been arranged beforehand at headquarters, and these particular troops supplied with special incendiary apparatus.  There is strong evidence to show that the destruction of Louvain, Termonde, and of several smaller towns, was all part of a definite plan of “frightfulness,” the real object being to terrorize Holland and Denmark, and to prevent any possibility of their joining with the Allies.  It is strictly scientific warfare, it produces a strictly scientific hell upon this world, and I think that one may have every reasonable hope that it leads to a strictly scientific hell in the next.  After a town has been shelled, its occupants driven out, and its buildings to a large extent broken down, the soldiers enter, each provided with a number of incendiary bombs, filled with a very inflammable compound.  They set light to these and throw them into the houses, and in a very few minutes each house is blazing.  In half an hour the town is a roaring furnace, and by the next day nothing is left but the bare walls.  And that is almost all that there was left of Termonde.  We walked along the quay beside a row of charred and blackened ruins, a twisted iron bedstead or a battered lamp being all there was to tell of the homes which these had been.  A few houses were still standing untouched, and on the door of each of these was scrawled in chalk the inscription: 

   “GUTE LEUTE,
    NICHT ANZUNDEN,
    Breitfuss, Lt.”

One wondered at what cost the approval of Lieutenant Breitfuss had been obtained.  His request to the soldiers not to set fire to the houses of these “good people” had been respected, but I think that if the Belgians ever return to Termonde those houses are likely to be empty.  There are things worse than having your house burnt down, and one would be to win the approval of Lieutenant Breitfuss.

We crossed the Dendre and wandered up the town towards the Square.  For a few moments I stood alone in a long curving street with not a soul in sight, and the utter desolation of the whole thing made me shiver.  Houses, shops, banks, churches, all gutted by the flames and destroyed.  The smell of burning from the smouldering ruins was sickening.  Every now and then the silence was broken by the fall of bricks or plaster.  Except a very few houses with that ominous inscription on their doors, there was nothing left; everything was destroyed.  A little farther on I went into the remains of a large factory equipped with elaborate machinery, but so complete was the destruction that I could not discover what had been made there.  There was a large gas engine and extensive shafting, all hanging in dismal chaos, and I recognized the remains of machines for making tin boxes, in which the products of the factory had, I suppose, been packed.  A large pile of glass stoppers in one corner was fused up into a solid mass, and I chipped a bit off as a memento.