Carriages with cushions naturally were reserved for the wounded, so we slept on wooden benches and on the floor.  It was not possible to obtain food, and water was as scarce.  At Graesbeek, ten miles from Brussels, we first saw houses on fire.  They continued with us to Liege.

Village after village had been completely wrecked.  In his march to the sea Sherman lived on the country.  He did not destroy it, and as against the burning of Columbia must be placed to the discredit of the Germans the wiping out of an entire countryside.

For many miles we saw procession after procession of peasants fleeing from one burning village, which had been their home, to other villages, to find only blackened walls and smouldering ashes.  In no part of northern Europe is there a countryside fairer than that between Aix-la-Chapelle and Brussels, but the Germans had made of it a graveyard.  It looked as though a cyclone had uprooted its houses, gardens, and orchards and a prairie fire had followed.

At seven o’clock in the evening we arrived at what for six hundred years had been the city of Louvain.  The Germans were burning it, and to hide their work kept us locked in the railroad carriages.  But the story was written against the sky, was told to us by German soldiers incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot.

The day before the Germans had sentenced Louvain to become a wilderness, and with German system and love of thoroughness they left Louvain an empty, blackened shell.  The reason for this appeal to the torch and the execution of non-combatants, as given to Mr. Whitlock and myself on the morning I left Brussels by General von Lutwitz, the military governor, was this:  The day before, while the German military commander of the troops in Louvain was at the Hotel de Ville talking to the burgomaster, a son of the burgomaster, with an automatic pistol, shot the chief of staff and German staff surgeons.

Lutwitz claimed this was the signal for the civil guard, in civilian clothes on the roofs, to fire upon the German soldiers in the open square below.  He said also the Belgians had quick-firing guns, brought from Antwerp.  As for a week the Germans had occupied Louvain and closely guarded all approaches, the story that there was any gun-running is absurd.

“Fifty Germans were killed and wounded,” said Lutwitz, “and for that Louvain must be wiped out—­so!” In pantomime with his fist he swept the papers across his table.

“The Hotel de Ville,” he added, “was a beautiful building; it is a pity it must be destroyed.”

Were he telling us his soldiers had destroyed a kitchen-garden, his tone could not have expressed less regret.

Ten days before I had been in Louvain, when it was occupied by Belgian troops and King Albert and his staff.  The city dates from the eleventh century, and the population was forty-two thousand.  The citizens were brewers, lace-makers, and manufacturers of ornaments for churches.  The university once was the most celebrated in European cities and was the headquarters of the Jesuits.