Louvain the Forsaken
It was Sunday when I saw Louvain in the ashes of her desolation. We
were just back then from the German trenches before Antwerp; and the
hollow sounds of the big guns which were fired there at spaced intervals
came to our ears as we rode over the road leading out from Brussels,
like the boomings of great bells. The last time I had gone that way the
country was full of refugees fleeing from burning villages on beyond.
Now it was bare, except for a few baggage trains lumbering along under
escort of shaggy gray troopers. Perhaps I should say they were gray-
and-yellow troopers, for the plastered mud and powdered dust of three
months of active campaigning had made them of true dirt color.
Oh, yes; I forgot one other thing: We overtook a string of wagons fitted
up as carryalls and bearing family parties of the burghers to Louvain to
spend a day among the wreckage. There is no accounting for tastes. If
I had been a Belgian the last thing I should want my wife and my baby to
see would be the ancient university town, the national cradle of the
Church, in its present state. Nevertheless there were many
excursionists in Louvain that day.
The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses
from as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from
Brussels. They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain
ranges of waste, and they mined in the debris mounds for souvenirs.
Altogether, I suppose some of them regarded it as a kind of picnic.
Personally I should rather go to a morgue for a picnic than to Louvain
as it looks to-day. I tried hard, both in Germany among the German
soldiers and in Belgium among the Belgians, to get at the truth about
Louvain. The Germans said the outbreak was planned, and that firing
broke out at a given signal in various quarters of the town; that, from
windows and basements and roofs, bullets rained on them; and that the
fighting continued until they had smoked the last of the inhabitants
from their houses with fire and put them to death as they fled. The
Belgians proclaimed just as stoutly that, mistaking an on marching
regiment for enemies, the Germans fired on their own people; and then,
in rage at having committed such an error and to cover it up, they
turned on the townspeople and mixed massacre with pillaging and burning
for the better part of a night and a day.
I could, I think, sense something of the viewpoint of each. To the
Belgian, a German in his home or in his town was no more than an armed
housebreaker. What did he care for the code of war? He was not
responsible for the war. He had no share in framing the code. He took
his gun, and when the chance came he fired---and fired to kill.
Perhaps, at first, he did not know that by that same act he forfeited
his life and sacrificed his home and jeopardized the lives and homes of
all his neighbors. Perhaps in the blind fury of the moment he did not
much care.
Take the German soldier: He had proved he was ready to meet his enemy in
the open and to fight him there. When his comrade fell at his side,
struck down by an unseen, skulking foe, who lurked behind a hedge or a
chimney, he saw red and he did red deeds. That in his reprisals he went
farther than some might have gone under similar conditions is rather to
have been expected. In point of organization, in discipline, and in the
enactment of a terribly stern, terribly deadly course of conduct for
just such emergencies, his masters had gone farther than the heads of
any modern army ever went before. You see, all the laboriously built-up
ethics of civilized peace came into direct conflict with the bloody
ethics of war, which are never civilized, and which frequently are born
in the instant and molded on the instant to suit the purposes of those
who create them. And Louvain is perhaps the most finished and perfect
example we have in this world to-day to show the consequences of such a
clash.
I am not going to try to describe Louvain. Others have done that
competently. The Belgians were approximately correct when they said
Louvain had been destroyed. The Germans were technically right when
they said not over twenty per cent of its area had been reduced; but
that twenty per cent included practically the whole business district,
practically all the better class of homes, the university, the
cathedral, the main thoroughfares, the principal hotels and shops and
cafes. The famous town hall alone stood unscathed; it was saved by
German soldiers from the common fate of all things about it. What
remained, in historic value and in physical beauty, and even in tangible
property value, was much less than what was gone forever.
I sought out the hotel near the station where we had stayed, as enforced
guests of the German army, for three days in August. Its site was a
leveled gray mass, sodden, wrecked past all redemption; ruined beyond
all thought of salvage. I looked for the little inn at which we had
dined. Its front wall littered the street and its interior was a jumble
of worthlessness. I wondered again as I had wondered many times before
what had become of its proprietor--the dainty, gentle little woman whose
misshapen figure told us she was near the time for her baby.
I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk cafe where we
sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation--August
twenty-first, I think, was the date--and watched the sun go out in
eclipse like a copper disk. We did not know it then, but it was
Louvain's bloody eclipse we saw presaged that day in the suddenly
darkened heavens. Even the lines of the sidewalks were loSt. The road
was piled high with broken, fire-smudged masonry. The building behind
was a building no longer. It was a husk of a house, open to the sky,
backless and front-less, and fit only to tumble down in the next high
wind.
As we stood before the empty railroad station, in what I veritably
believe to be the forlornest spot there is on this earth, a woman in a
shawl came whining to sell us postal cards, on which were views of the
desolation that was all about us.
"Please buy some pictures," she said in French. "My husband is dead."
"When did he die?" one of us asked.
She blinked, as though trying to remember.
"That night," she said as though there had never been but one night.
"They killed him then--that night." "Who killed him?" "They did."
She pointed in the direction of the square fronting the station. There
were German soldiers where she pointed--both living ones and dead ones.
The dead ones, eighty-odd of them, were buried in two big crosswise
trenches, in a circular plot that had once been a bed of ornamental
flowers surrounding the monument of some local notable. The living ones
were standing sentry duty at the fence that flanked the railroad tracks
beyond.
"They did," she said; "they killed him! Will you buy some postal cards,
m'sieur? All the best pictures of the ruins!"
She said it flatly, without color in her voice, or feeling or emotion.
She did not, I am sure, flinch mentally as she looked at the Germans.
Certainly she did not flinch visibly. She was past flinching, I
suppose.
The officer in command of the force holding the town came, just before
we started, to warn us to beware of bicyclists who might be encountered
near Tirlemont.
"They are all franc-tireurs--those Belgians on wheels," he said. "Some
of them are straggling soldiers, wearing uniforms under their other
clothes. They will shoot at you and trust to their bicycles to get
away. We've caught and killed some of them, but there are still a few
abroad. Take no chances with them. If I were in your place I should be
ready to shoot first."
We asked him how the surviving populace of Louvain was behaving.
"Oh, we have them--like that!" he said with a laugh, and clenched his
hand up in a knot of knuckles to show what he meant. "They know better
than to shoot at a German soldier now; but if looks would kill we'd all
be dead men a hundred times a day." And he laughed again.
Of course it was none of our business; but it seemed to us that if we
were choosing a man to pacify and control the ruined people of ruined
Louvain this square-headed, big-fisted captain would not have been our
first choice.
It began to rain hard as our automobile moved through the wreckage-
strewn street which, being followed, would bring us to the homeward
road--home in this instance meaning Germany. The rain, soaking into the
debris, sent up a sour, nasty smell, which pursued us until we had
cleared the town. That exhalation might fully have been the breath of
the wasted place, just as the distant, never-ending boom of the guns
might have been the lamenting voice of the war-smitten land itself.
I remember Liege best at this present distance by reason of a small
thing that occurred as we rode, just before dusk, through a byway near
the river. In the gloomy, wet Sunday street two bands of boys were
playing at being soldiers. Being soldiers is the game all the children
in Northern Europe have played since the first of last August.
From doorways and window sills their lounging elders watched these Liege
urchins as they waged their mimic fight with wooden guns and wooden
swords; but, while we looked on, one boy of an inventive turn of mind
was possessed of a great idea. He proceeded to organize an execution
against a handy wall, with one small person to enact the role of the
condemned culprit and half a dozen others to make up the firing squad.
As the older spectators realized what was afoot a growl of dissent
rolled up and down the street; and a stout, red-faced matron, shrilly
protesting, ran out into the road and cuffed the boys until they broke
and scattered. There was one game in Liege the boys might not play.
The last I saw of Belgium was when I skirted her northern frontier,
making for the seacoast. The guns were silent now, for Antwerp had
surrendered; and over all the roads leading up into Holland refugees
were pouring in winding streams. They were such refugees as I had seen
a score of times before, only now there were infinitely more of them
than ever before: men, women and children, all afoot; all burdened with
bags and bundles; all dressed in their best clothes--they did well to
save their best, since they could save so little else--all or nearly all
bearing their inevitable black umbrellas.
They must have come long distances; but I marked that none of them
moaned or complained, or gave up in weariness and despair. They went on
and on, with their weary backs bent to their burdens and their weary
legs trembling under them; and we did not know where they were going--
and they did not know. They just went. What they must face before them
could not equal what they left behind them; so they went on.
That poor little rag doll, with its head crushed in the wheel tracks,
does not after all furnish such a good comparison for Belgium, I think,
as I finish this tale; for it had sawdust insides--and Belgium's vitals
are the vitals of courage and patience.