her great churches and Hotel de Ville gave to the city grace and dignity.  Ten days later, when I again saw it, Louvain was in darkness, lit only by burning buildings.  Rows and rows of streets were lined with black, empty walls.  Louvain was a city of the past, another Pompeii, and her citizens were being led out to be shot.  The fate of Louvain was the fate of Vise, of Malines, of Tirlemont, of Liege, of hundreds of villages and towns, and by the time this is printed it will be the fate of hundreds of other towns over all of Europe.  In this war the waste of horses is appalling.  Those that first entered Brussels with the German army had been bred and trained for the purposes of war, and they were magnificent specimens.  Every one who saw them exclaimed ungrudgingly in admiration.  But by the time the army reached the approaches of Paris the forced marches had so depleted the stock of horses that for remounts the Germans were seizing all they met.  Those that could not keep up were shot.  For miles along the road from Meaux to Soissons and Rheims their bodies tainted the air.

They had served their purposes, and after six weeks of campaigning the same animals that in times of peace would have proved faithful servants for many years were destroyed that they might not fall into the hands of the French.  Just as an artillery-man spikes his gun, the Germans on their retreat to the Aisne River left in their wake no horse that might assist in their pursuit.  As they withdrew they searched each stable yard and killed the horses.  In village after village I saw horses lying in the stalls or in the fields still wearing the harness of the plough, or in groups of three or four in the yard of a barn, each with a bullet-hole in its temple.  They were killed for fear they might be useful.

Waste can go no further.  Another example of waste were the motor-trucks and automobiles.  When the war began the motor-trucks of the big department stores and manufacturers and motor-buses of London, Paris, and Berlin were taken over by the different armies.  They had cost them from two thousand to three thousand dollars each, and in times of peace, had they been used for the purposes for which they were built, would several times over have paid for themselves.  But war gave them no time to pay even for their tires.  You saw them by the roadside, cast aside like empty cigarette-boxes.  A few hours’ tinkering would have set them right.  They were still good for years of service.  But an army in retreat or in pursuit has no time to waste in repairing motors.  To waste the motor is cheaper.

Between Villers-Cotterets and Soissons the road was strewn with high-power automobiles and motor-trucks that the Germans had been forced to destroy.  Something had gone wrong, something that at other times could easily have been mended.  But with the French in pursuit there was no time to pause, nor could cars of such value be left to the enemy.  So they had been set on fire or blown up, or allowed