On the latter point the statement of the escaped Dutch resident already quoted is circumstantial, and since this is not a Belgian witness, his relation may be accepted as unbiassed. He says:—
Before the Germans entered the town the Civic Guard had been disarmed, and all weapons in the possession of the population had to be given up. Even toy guns and toy pistols and precious collections of old weapons, bows and arrows, and other antique arms useless for any kind of modern warfare had to be surrendered, and all these things—sometimes of great personal value to the owner—have since been destroyed by the Germans. The value of one single private collection has been estimated at about £1,000. From the pulpits the priests urged the people to keep calm, as that was the only way to prevent harm being done to them.
A few days after the entry of the German troops the military authority agreed to cease quartering their men in private houses, in return for a payment of 100,000 francs (£4,000) per day. On some houses between forty and fifty men had been billeted. After the first payment of the voluntary contribution the soldiers camped in the open or in the public buildings. The beautiful rooms in the Town Hall, where the civil marriages take place, were used as a stable for cavalry horses.
At first everything the soldiers bought was paid for in cash or promissory notes, but later this was altered. Soldiers came and asked for change, and when this was handed to them they tendered in return for the hard cash a piece of paper—a kind of receipt.
All the houses abandoned by their owners were ransacked, notwithstanding the warnings from the military authorities forbidding the troops to pillage. The Germans imprisoned as hostages of war the Burgomaster, two magistrates, and a number of influential citizens.
On Sunday, the 23rd, I and some other influential people in the town were roused from our beds. We were informed that an order had been given that 250 mattresses, 200 lb. of coffee, 250 loaves of bread, and 500 eggs must be on the market-place within an hour. On turning out we found the Burgomaster standing on the market-place, and crowds of citizens, half naked, or in their night attire, carrying everything they could lay hands on to the market, that no harm might befall their Burgomaster. After this had been done the German officer in command told us that his orders had been misinterpreted, and that he only wanted the mattresses.
On this, it is clear that the townspeople did everything possible to avoid giving offence to these brutal enemies. On the other hand, it is equally clear that the German military “authorities” issued orders against pillage by the troops, which were taken by the latter, and must have been well known to be, hypocritical.
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The proofs as to the real responsibility for this foul deed are irresistible. The soldiers of Alva at their worst never perpetrated any horror so utterly cowardly. They were fired by the fury of religious zeal. Blindly mistaken and politically disastrous as it proved to be, it was a motive worthy of respect by the side of the stupid hate and the mean fear born of the grovelling and greedy materialism of these “conquerors.”
The destroyers saved the incomparable town hall, because they destined it to be an ornament of a Germanised Belgium. The rest of the town, however, and more particularly the older part of it, was reduced to a blackened ruin, from which, as from other burning towns, arose a mighty cloud of smoke. Doubtless it was hoped that this spectacle, visible from Antwerp, as well as from Brussels, would strike terror into the people. What they could not gain by arms the Germans sought to gain by the devices of barbarity. But a Nemesis waits on this mode of “warfare.” It is related by Lamartine that after their subjugation of Servia the Turks collected into a pyramid the skulls of the slain. This ghastly monument, situated in a desolate valley, the scene of a great battle, was intended as an everlasting warning. To the Serbs it became a remembrance of the price their fathers had been willing to pay for liberty: a revered national memorial which kept alive the spirit which at last crushed their oppressors.
In the same way, the oppressors of Belgium fanned the fires of resistance. In the library of the University of Louvain they had destroyed ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental texts and manuscripts of priceless value; they had not destroyed the valour of one Belgian heart. They had laid in ashes a place which had rightly been called by Lipsius the Belgian Athens, and had earned the praise and admiration of philosophers from Erasmus to Sir William Hamilton; they had but enhanced the glory of the town where, while Northern Europe was still covered by intellectual night, and “kultur” had not yet shed its radiance on Germany, nor contributed to produce a Prussian army, a community of mere weavers had, first among the municipalities of Europe, founded out of their hard earnings, a seat of philosophy, science, and the arts, and in its twenty-eight colleges, the nurseries of many famous men, for centuries led the way in their cultivation. Its university buildings and its library; its art treasures[G]; its Academy of Painting; its School of Music; its Museum of National History had been committed to the flames at the hands of rabble soldiery, urged on by still more degraded officers, but the brand applied was applied to their own country, whose good name they had burned from among nations.