“Of course,” replied General von Boehn, “there is always danger of women and children being killed during street fighting if they insist on coming into the streets.  It is unfortunate, but it is war.”

“But how about a woman’s body I saw with the hands and feet cut off?  How about the white-haired man and his son whom I helped to bury outside of Sempst, who had been killed merely because a retreating Belgian soldier had shot a German soldier outside their house?  There were twenty-two bayonet wounds in the old man’s face.  I counted them.  How about the little girl, two years old, who was shot while in her mother’s arms by a Uhlan and whose funeral I attended at Heyst-op-den-Berg?  How about the old man near Vilvorde who was hung by his hands from the rafters of his house and roasted to death by a bonfire being built under him?”

The general seemed taken aback by the exactness of my information.

“Such things are horrible if true,” he said.  “Of course, our soldiers, like soldiers in all armies, sometimes get out of hand and do things which we would never tolerate if we knew it.  At Louvain, for example, I sentenced two soldiers to twelve years’ penal servitude each for assaulting a woman.”

“Apropos of Louvain,” I remarked, “why did you destroy the library?”

“We regretted that as much as anyone else,” was the answer.  “It caught fire from burning houses and we could not save it.”

“But why did you burn Louvain at all?” I asked.

“Because the townspeople fired on our troops.  We actually found machine-guns in some of the houses.  And,” smashing his fist down upon the table, “whenever civilians fire upon our troops we will teach them a lasting lesson.  If women and children insist on getting in the way of bullets, so much the worse for the women and children.”

“How do you explain the bombardment of Antwerp by Zeppelins?” I inquired.

“Zeppelins have orders to drop their bombs only on fortifications and soldiers,” he answered.

“As a matter of fact,” I remarked, “they destroyed only private houses and innocent civilians, several of whom were women.  If one of those bombs had dropped two hundred yards nearer my hotel I wouldn’t be here to-day smoking one of your excellent cigars.”

“That is a calamity which, thank God, didn’t happen,” he replied.

“If you feel for my safety as deeply as that, General,” I said, earnestly, “you can make quite sure of my coming to no harm by sending no more Zeppelins.”

“Well, Herr Powell,” he said, laughing, “we will think about it.  And,” he continued gravely, “I trust that you will tell the American people, through your great paper, what I have told you to-day.  Let them hear our side of this atrocity business.  It is only justice that they should be made familiar with both sides of the question.”