“I saw them smashing in the door of the house across the way,” said Madame Callebaut, “and when the flames burst forth they rushed over here, and I fell down on my knees before them, crying out, ‘For the love of Heaven, spare an old woman’s house!’”

It must have been a dramatic, soul-curdling sight, with the wail of the woman rising above the crashing walls and the roaring flames.  And it must have been effective pleading to stop men in their wild rush lusting to destroy.  But Madame Callebaut was endowed with powerful emotions.  Carried away in her recital of the events, she fell down on her knees before me, wringing her hands and pleading so piteously that I felt for a moment as if I were a fiendish Teuton with a firebrand about to set the old lady’s house afire.  I can understand how the wildest men capitulated to such pleadings, and how they came down the steps to write, in big, clear words,

“Nicht Anbrennen”
(Do not set fire)

Only they unwittingly wrote it upon her neighbor’s walls, thus saving both houses.

How much a savior of other homes Madame Callebaut had been Termonde will never know.  Certainly she made the firing squad first pause in the wild debauch of destruction.  For frequently now an undamaged house stood with the words chalked on its front, “Only harmless old woman lives here; do not burn down.”  Underneath were the numbers and initials of the particular corps of the Kaiser’s Imperial Army.  Often the flames had committed Lese majeste by leaping onto the forbidden house, and there amidst the charred ruins stood a door or a wall bearing the mocking inscription, “Nicht Anbrennen.”

Another house, belonging to Madame Louise Bal, bore the words, “Protected; Gute alte Leute hier” (good old people here).  A great shell from a distant battery had totally disregarded this sign and had torn through the parlor, exploding in the back yard, ripping the clothes from the line, but touching neither of the inmates.  As the Chinese ambassador pertinently remarked when reassured by Whitlock that the Germans would not bombard the embassies, “Ah! but a cannon has no eyes.”

These houses stood up like lone survivors above the wreckage wrought by fire and shell, and by contrast served to emphasize the dismal havoc everywhere.  “So this was once a city,” one mused to himself; “and these streets, now sounding with the footfalls of some returning sentry, did they once echo with the roar of traffic?  And those demolished shops, were they once filled with the babble of the traders?  Over yonder in that structure, which looks so much like a church, did the faithful once come to pray and to worship God?  Can it be that these courtyards, now held in the thrall of death-like silence, once rang to the laughter of the little children?” One said to himself, “Surely this is some wild dream.  Wake up.”