The Burning Of Louvain
After the Germans occupied Brussels they closed the road to Aix-la-
Chapelle. A week later, to carry their wounded and prisoners, they
reopened it. But for eight days Brussels was isolated. The mail-trains
and the telegraph office were in the hands of the invaders. They
accepted our cables, censored them, and three days later told us, if
we still wished, we could forward them. But only from Holland. By this
they accomplished three things: they learned what we were writing
about them, for three days prevented any news from leaving the city,
and offered us an inducement to visit Holland, so getting rid of us.
The despatches of those diplomats who still remained in Brussels
were treated in the same manner. With the most cheerful
complacency the military authorities blue-pencilled their despatches
to their governments. When the diplomats learned of this, with their
code cables they sent open cables stating that their confidential
despatches were being censored and delayed. They still were
delayed. To get any message out of Brussels it was necessary to use
an automobile, and nearly every automobile had taken itself off to
Antwerp. If a motor-car appeared it was at once commandeered. This
was true also of horses and bicycles. All over Brussels you saw
delivery wagons, private carriages, market carts with the shafts empty
and the horse and harness gone. After three days a German soldier
who did not own a bicycle was poor indeed.
Requisitions were given for these machines, stating they would be
returned after the war, by which time they will be ready for the scrap-
heap. Any one on a bicycle outside the city was arrested, so the only
way to get messages through was by going on foot to Ostend or
Holland, or by an automobile for which the German authorities
had given a special pass. As no one knew when one of these
automobiles might start, we carried always with us our cables and
letters, and intrusted them to any stranger who was trying to run the
lines.
No one wished to carry our despatches, as he feared they might
contain something unfavorable to the Germans, which, if he were
arrested and the cables read, might bring him into greater trouble.
Money for himself was no inducement. But I found if I gave money for
the Red Cross no one would refuse it, or to carry the messages.
Three out of four times the stranger would be arrested and ordered
back to Brussels, and our despatches, with their news value
departed, would be returned.
An account of the Germans entering Brussels I sent by an English
boy named Dalton, who, after being turned back three times, got
through by night, and when he arrived in England his adventures
were published in all the London papers. They were so thrilling that
they made my story, for which he had taken the trip, extremely tame
reading.
Hugh Gibson, secretary of the American legation, was the first person
in an official position to visit Antwerp after the Belgian Government
moved to that city, and, even with his passes and flag flying from his
automobile, he reached Antwerp and returned to Brussels only after
many delays and adventures. Not knowing the Belgians were
advancing from the north, Gibson and his American flag were several
times under fire, and on the days he chose for his excursion his route
led him past burning towns and dead and wounded and between the
lines of both forces actively engaged.
He was carrying despatches from Brand Whitlock to Secretary Bryan.
During the night he rested at Antwerp the first Zeppelin air-ship to visit
that city passed over it, dropping one bomb at the end of the block in
which Gibson was sleeping. He was awakened by the explosion and
heard all of those that followed.
The next morning he was requested to accompany a committee
appointed by the Belgian Government to report upon the outrage,
and he visited a house that had been wrecked, and saw what was left
of the bodies of those killed. People who were in the streets when the
air-ship passed said it moved without any sound, as though the motor
had been shut off and it was being propelled by momentum.
One bomb fell so near the palace where the Belgian Queen was
sleeping as to destroy the glass in the windows and scar the walls.
The bombs were large, containing smaller bombs of the size of
shrapnel. Like shrapnel, on impact they scattered bullets over a
radius of forty yards. One man, who from a window in the eighth story
of a hotel watched the air-ship pass, stated that before each bomb fell
he saw electric torches signal from the roofs, as though giving
directions as to where the bombs should strike.
After my arrest by the Germans, I found my usefulness in Brussels as
a correspondent was gone, and I returned to London, and from there
rejoined the Allies in Paris.
I left Brussels on August 27th with Gerald Morgan and Will Irwin, of
Collier's, on a train carrying English prisoners and German wounded.
In times of peace the trip to the German border lasts three hours, but
in making it we were twenty-six hours, and by order of the authorities
we were forbidden to leave the train.
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 Hôtel
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 Hôtel 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.
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 cafés. 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.
In the two hours during which the train circled the burning city war
was before us in its most hateful aspect.
In other wars I have watched men on one hilltop, without haste,
without heat, fire at men on another hill, and in consequence on both
sides good men were wasted. But in those fights there were no
women or children, and the shells struck only vacant stretches of
veldt or uninhabited mountain sides.
At Louvain it was war upon the defenceless, war upon churches,
colleges, shops of milliners and lace-makers; war brought to the
bedside and the fireside; against women harvesting in the fields,
against children in wooden shoes at play in the streets.
At Louvain that night the Germans were like men after an orgy.
There were fifty English prisoners, erect and soldierly. In the ocean of
gray the little patch of khaki looked pitifully lonely, but they regarded
the men who had outnumbered but not defeated them with calm,
uncurious eyes. In one way I was glad to see them there. Later they
will bear witness. They will tell how the enemy makes a wilderness
and calls it war. It was a most weird picture. On the high ground rose
the broken spires of the Church of St. Pierre and the Hôtel de Ville,
and descending like steps were row beneath row of houses, roofless,
with windows like blind eyes. The fire had reached the last row of
houses, those on the Boulevard de Jodigne. Some of these were
already cold, but others sent up steady, straight columns of flame. In
others at the third and fourth stories the window curtains still hung,
flowers still filled the window-boxes, while on the first floor the torch
had just passed and the flames were leaping. Fire had destroyed the
electric plant, but at times the flames made the station so light that
you could see the second-hand of your watch, and again all was
darkness, lit only by candles.
You could tell when an officer passed by the electric torch he carried
strapped to his chest. In the darkness the gray uniforms filled the
station with an army of ghosts. You distinguished men only when
pipes hanging from their teeth glowed red or their bayonets flashed.
Outside the station in the public square the people of Louvain passed
in an unending procession, women bareheaded, weeping, men
carrying the children asleep on their shoulders, all hemmed in by the
shadowy army of gray wolves. Once they were halted, and among
them were marched a line of men. These were on their way to be
shot. And, better to point the moral, an officer halted both processions
and, climbing to a cart, explained why the men were to die. He
warned others not to bring down upon themselves a like vengeance.
As those being led to spend the night in the fields looked across to
those marked for death they saw old friends, neighbors of long
standing, men of their own household. The officer bellowing at them
from the cart was illuminated by the headlights of an automobile. He
looked like an actor held in a spotlight on a darkened stage.
It was all like a scene upon the stage, unreal, inhuman. You felt it
could not be true. You felt that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling
and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a
painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark ruins came
from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and
peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but
that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their
wives and children.
You felt it was only a nightmare, cruel and uncivilized. And then you
remembered that the German Emperor has told us what it is. It is his
Holy War.