Sacrilegious Fires
None the more were churches spared. The invader, the enemy alike of his foe’s taste and of his religious faith, spent as it were a double ferocity on the work of destroying the temples of God.
“The church at Aerschot,” writes the Belgian Commission of Inquiry in one of its reports, “is a lamentable spectacle. Its three entrances and those of the sacristy have been more or less consumed. The entrance leading to the nave, and the side entrance on the right, both of massive oak, seem to have been hammered with a battering-ram after the flames had reached them.”
The same was the case at Révigny, the church which was classed among historic monuments, and in many other Belgian and French villages which, when they were totally or partially destroyed by fire, also lost the home of their religion.
Desecration of Churches
The Germans were not content with destruction. On several occasions they went out of their way to desecrate holy places; so much perversity, worse even than barbarism, is there in the regular habits of this nation and in the education which they receive.
The church of Aerschot was not merely burned, it was also polluted; and the following narrative, given by a woman who was an eye-witness, a correspondent of the Evening News (of 24th September, 1914), will help to give us some idea of what went on there—
“On the high altar,” wrote this journalist, “there were three empty champagne bottles, two rum, a broken bordeaux bottle and five beer bottles. In the confessionals other champagne, brandy and beer bottles, also empty.
“On the marble flags, heaps of straw everywhere, heaps of bottles, rubbish and filth. On the forms, on the chairs, bottles and still more bottles, champagne, beer, rum, bordeaux, burgundy and brandy. In all directions wherever we cast our eyes, to whatever part of the church we looked, there were nothing but bottles by the hundred, by the thousand, perhaps; everywhere bottles, bottles, bottles.