Three hours after midnight on the day the Germans began their three days’ march through Brussels I had crossed the Square Rogier to send a despatch by one of the many last trains for Ostend.  When I returned to the Palace Hotel, seated on the iron chairs on the sidewalk were a woman, her three children, and two maid servants.  The woman was in mourning, which was quite new, for, though the war was only a month old, many had been killed, among them her husband.  The day before, at Tirlemont, shells had destroyed her chateau, and she was on her way to England.  She had around her neck two long strings of pearls, the maids each held a small hand-bag, her boy clasped in his arms a forlorn and sleepy fox-terrier, and each of the little girls was embracing a bird-cage.  In one was a canary, in the other a parrot.  That was all they had saved.  In their way they were just as pathetic as the peasants sleeping under the hedges.  They were just as homeless, friendless, just as much in need of food and sleep, and in their eyes was the same look of fear and horror.  Bernhardi tells his countrymen that war is glorious, heroic, and for a nation an economic necessity.  Instead, it is stupid, unintelligent.  It creates nothing; it only wastes.

If it confined itself to destroying forts and cradles of barbed wire then it would be sufficiently hideous.  But it strikes blindly, brutally; it tramples on the innocent and the beautiful.  It is the bull in the china shop and the mad dog who snaps at children who are trying only to avoid him.  People were incensed at the destruction in Louvain of the library, the Catholic college, the Church of St. Pierre that dated from the thirteenth century.  These buildings belonged to the world, and over their loss the world was rightfully indignant, but in Louvain there were also shops and manufactories, hotels and private houses.  Each belonged, not to the world, but to one family.  These individual families made up a city of forty-five thousand people.  In two days there was not a roof left to cover one of them.  The trade those people had built up had been destroyed, the “good-will and fixings,” the stock on the shelves and in the storerooms, the goods in the shop-windows, the portraits in the drawing-room, the souvenirs and family heirlooms, the love-letters, the bride’s veil, the baby’s first worsted shoes, and the will by which some one bequeathed to his beloved wife all his worldly goods.

War came and sent all these possessions, including the will and the worldly goods, up into the air in flames.  Most of the people of Louvain made their living by manufacturing church ornaments and brewing beer.  War was impartial, and destroyed both the beer and the church ornaments.  It destroyed also the men who made them, and it drove the women and children into concentration camps.  When first I visited Louvain it was a brisk, clean, prosperous city.  The streets were spotless, the shop-windows and cafes were modern, rich-looking, inviting, and