“Deep and deadly must be the vengeance which the defenders of
civilization will exact from these new apostles of brutality. Even
Attila had his better side. He spared Milan. It has been said of him
that, though he destroyed cities without remorse, he respected the laws
of nations as they were understood in his day. The modern Attila
respects neither the laws of nations nor the laws of God. His evil deeds
cry aloud to Heaven and to the horror-struck watching nations. The
infamous crime of the destruction of Louvain is without a parallel even
in the dark ages. The harmless civil population had been disarmed a week
ago. The German garrison at the gates of the town fired upon another
force of their own countrymen. To conceal their blunder, they laid the
blame upon the helpless townspeople. No denials were listened to. Some
of the men of Louvain were shot, the rest were made prisoners, the women
and children were flung into trains and carried off to an unknown
destination, and the city was razed to the ground. Louvain has ceased
to exist. A town of forty thousand inhabitants, bigger than Crewe or
Dover or Colchester or Keighley, has been completely wiped out. The
wickedness of this abominable act shall be expiated to the uttermost
when the day of reckoning comes.
“Until now we have maintained an attitude of deliberate reserve upon the
innumerable tales of German atrocities which have reached us. We
published without comment the unanswerable list of shocking excesses
committed by the German troops, which was sent to England by the Belgian
authorities. When a German Zeppelin cast bombs upon ill-fated women
asleep in their beds at Antwerp, we did no more than explain the
bearings of international law upon conduct which has met with universal
reprobation in Europe and America. But now the real object of German
savagery is self-revealed, not only by the effacement of Louvain, but by
the shameful admissions sent forth from the wireless station at Berlin.
Last Thursday night the following official notification regarding
Belgium came vibrating through the air:--
“‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil
population has been to interfere with unstinting severity and to create
examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole
country.’
“Such is the cynical nature of the German apologia for the destruction
of Louvain. Such is the character of the warfare of the modern Huns.
They seek to strike terror into the hearts of their foes by methods
which belong to the days of the old barbaric hosts, who were thought to
have vanished from the world for ever. There must be no mistake about
the opportionment of blame for this and numberless other crimes. We have
listened too long to the bleatings of professors bemused by the false
glamour of a philosophy which the Germans themselves have thrust aside.
“=The Kaiser and his people are alike responsible for the acts of their
Government and their troops, and there can be no differentiation when
the day of reckoning comes. The Kaiser could stop these things with a
word. Instead, he pronounces impious benedictions upon them. Daily he
appeals for the blessings of God upon the dreadful deeds which are
staining the face of Western Europe--the ravaged villages, the hapless
non-combatants hanged or shot, the women and children torn from their
beds by cowards and made to walk before them under threats of all the
infamies which have eternally disgraced German ‘valour.’=”