innumerable transport waggons, amid the applause of his proud father’s subjects.  He is of course carrying out the new gospel of the Fatherland that everyone has a perfect right to whatever he is strong enough to take.  But some day that doctrine may spread from the exalted and sacred circle in which it is now the guiding star to the “cannon fodder.”  Some day the common people will have learnt the lesson which is being so sedulously taught to them both by example and by precept, and then the day of reckoning will have come.

Loot and destruction have always gone hand in hand.  The private soldier cannot carry loot, and it is one of the most primitive instincts of animal nature to destroy rather than to leave that by which others may profit.  Even the pavement artist will destroy his work rather than allow some poor wretch to sit beside his pictures and collect an alms.  And there is great joy in destroying that which men are too coarse to appreciate, in feeling that they have in their power that which, something tells them, belongs to a refinement they cannot attain.  That was the keynote of the excesses of the French Revolution, for nothing arouses the fury of the unclean so much as cleanliness, and a man has been killed before now for daring to wash his hands.  And it is this elemental love of destroying that has raged through Belgium in the last few months, for though destruction has been the policy of their commanders, the German soldier has done it for love.  No order could ever comprehend the ingenious detail of much that we saw, for it bore at every turn the marks of individuality.  It is interesting to ponder on a future Germany of which these men, or rather these wild beasts, will be the sons.  Germany has destroyed more than the cities of Belgium; she has destroyed her own soul.

It is not in the ruined towns or the battered cathedrals of Belgium that one sees most clearly the wholehearted way in which the German soldiers have carried out the commands of their lord and made his desires their own.  Louvain, Termonde, Dinant, and a hundred other towns have been uprooted by order.  If you wish to see what the German soldier can do for love, you have to visit the chateaux which are dotted so thickly all over the Belgian countryside.  Here he has had a free hand, and the destruction he1 wrought had no political object and served no mere utilitarian purpose.  It was the work of pure affection, and it showed Germany at her best.  One would like to have brought one of those chateaux over to England, to be kept for all time as an example of German culture, that our children might turn from it in horror, and that our country might be saved from the hypocrisy and the selfishness of which this is the fruit.