“My God!” I almost shouted the words in my astonishment. “It is a German officer!” The picture before us was a cheap cabinet photograph of a lieutenant of infantry, evidently a Prussian, his crop head showing beneath his cap, his steady, narrow eyes gazing straight into ours! His right cheek was slashed with Schmizzes of student duels; his hard mouth was half covered with bristling moustaches, and the white and black ribbon of the Iron Cross, second class, peeped from his buttonhole. “Mahn, Ober-Leutnant,” I read, written across the lower half of the photograph with a military flourish, and under it in fine Flemish script in another hand, “The saviour of Mont César, Louvain, August, 1914.”
“Monsieur is puzzled?”
“Puzzled? I am thunder-struck! Is this Belgium, or is it Germany, brother?”
Father Jan gazed at me sorrowfully. “You do not yet understand. This is still Belgium, and God will punish the guilty. Listen, monsieur, you understand Latin?” He pointed down the corridors where the bass voices were chanting again in unison. “You hear what they are singing?”
“No,” I said.
“Listen, monsieur le Délégué, Primo—anno—magni—belli—in the first year of the Great War—sub—bono—rege—Alberto—in the reign of good King Albert—praefectus Mahnius—monasterium—montis Caesarii—ab exitio—servavit—laus Deo!—Officer Mahn saved from destruction the monastery of Mont César.”
“We had fled to Malines, monsieur, we monks of Mont César, and two days after Louvain had been put to the torch Dom Egbert ordered me to return to the monastery and care for it. Such lamentations, monsieur! My brothers and I knew I was going to my death, and my blood froze even to think of what the Germans might do to me; but I went, monsieur, I went guided by God, doubtless, through the hordes of refugees along the roads, and the Belgian outposts, and the Germans, and so at dusk I reached the porte de Malines and saw our sacred monastery still unharmed by the fires, untouched by the vandals.
“Louvain flared like a furnace. From kilometres away I saw it like a red blot on the sky, and the stench of its burning spread thoughts so mournful that one entered veritably as if into the house of death.
“Monsieur le Délégué, there was no sound here at our monastery, so I knocked, and then suddenly some one had me by the throat with harsh hands and a voice grunted in German, ‘So, spy! I have thee?’