In the Louvain College many priests now in America have been educated, and ten days before, over the great yellow walls of the college, I had seen hanging two American flags.  I had found the city clean, sleepy, and pretty, with narrow, twisting streets and smart shops and cafes.  Set in flower gardens were the houses, with red roofs, green shutters, and white walls.

Over those that faced south had been trained pear-trees, their branches, heavy with fruit, spread out against the walls like branches of candelabra.  The town hall was an example of Gothic architecture, in detail and design more celebrated even than the town hall of Bruges or Brussels.  It was five hundred years old, and lately had been repaired with taste and at great cost.

Opposite was the Church of St. Pierre, dating from the fifteenth century, a very noble building, with many chapels filled with carvings of the time of the Renaissance in wood, stone, and iron.  In the university were one hundred and fifty thousand volumes.

Near it was the bronze statue of Father Damien, priest of the leper colony in the South Pacific, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote.

On the night of the 27th these buildings were empty, exploded cartridges.  Statues, pictures, carvings, parchments, archives—­all these were gone.

No one defends the sniper.  But because ignorant Mexicans, when their city was invaded, fired upon our sailors, we did not destroy Vera Cruz.  Even had we bombarded Vera Cruz, money could have restored that city.  Money can never restore Louvain.  Great architects and artists, dead these six hundred years, made it beautiful, and their handiwork belonged to the world.  With torch and dynamite the Germans turned those masterpieces into ashes, and all the Kaiser’s horses and all his men cannot bring them back again.

When our troop train reached Louvain, the entire heart of the city was destroyed, and the fire had reached the Boulevard Tirlemont, which faces the railroad station.  The night was windless, and the sparks rose in steady, leisurely pillars, falling back into the furnace from which they sprang.  In their work the soldiers were moving from the heart of the city to the outskirts, street by street, from house to house.

In each building they began at the first floor and, when that was burning steadily, passed to the one next.  There were no exceptions—­ whether it was a store, chapel, or private residence, it was destroyed.  The occupants had been warned to go, and in each deserted shop or house the furniture was piled, the torch was stuck under it, and into the air went the savings of years, souvenirs of children, of parents, heirlooms that had passed from generation to generation.

The people had time only to fill a pillowcase and fly.  Some were not so fortunate, and by thousands, like flocks of sheep, they were rounded up and marched through the night to concentration camps.  We were not allowed to speak to any citizen of Louvain, but the Germans crowded the windows of the train, boastful, gloating, eager to interpret.