A MODERN POMPEII
Fair Louvain is now a place of desolation and ashes. Its treasures have been madly sacrificed to the god of war. A graphic description of the ruin has been written by Professor E. Gilson, of the University of Louvain, in the form of a letter to the Belgian Minister of Justice. It says in part:
“At the ‘Seven Corners’ Louvain reveals itself to my eyes like a luminous panorama in the glade of a forest. The center of the city is a smoking heap of ruins. Houses are caved in, nothing remains but smoking ruins, and a mass of brick. It is a veritable Pompeii. But how much more tragic and vivid is the sight of this new Pompeii! An oppressive silence everywhere. Everybody has fled; at the windows of cellars I see frightened faces, and at the street corners Prussian sentinels, sordid, immovable and silent.
“In the center stand the walls of St. Pierre, now a grinning silhouette, roof and belfry gone, the walls blackened and caved in. In front stands the Hôtel de Ville, dominating everything and almost intact. Further on, the remains of Les Hales, entirely destroyed, except for the arcade of big pillars of the Salle des Pas Perdus. The library and its treasures are entirely gone.
“In the Petite Rue Louis Nelsens everything is destroyed. At the foot of the statue, in a flower bed all tramped underfoot, there is an irregular hillock covered with a few dead leaves. An old woman, recognizing me, comes out of her cellar and tells me: ‘Monsieur, this is the grave of Monsieur David and his son, the best people that ever lived.’ She cries. They were killed by shrapnel fired upon them as they were leaving their house. The Capuchin brothers made temporary graves for the dead.
“Graves were found nearly everywhere. In front of the statue, near a house, I find traces of fire. ‘In this place,’ the old woman tells me, ‘the Prussians burned a body after soaking it in petroleum. Some men buried the charred remains.’ I pick up a key which must have belonged to the dead man—a memento of this monstrous incident.
“In the center of the city the sight is extraordinarily picturesque—gloomy, abominable, and more so in the evening when the full moon is shining over the mass of ruins, it is really fantastic, diabolical.
“The center of old Louvain, the old city of the Dukes of Brabant, exists no longer; a new city will have to be built in the center of the quarters spared by the torch.