CHAPTER XV
DESTROYING THE PRICELESS MONUMENTS OF CIVILIZATION
[THE INEXPIABLE GERMAN CRIME, LOUVAIN] — [ART TREASURES OF HISTORIC CITY] — [REDUCED TO A HEAP OF ASHES] — [PITILESS DESTRUCTION AS TOLD BY TOWN TREASURER] — [A MODERN POMPEII] — [BURNING OF CITY SYSTEMATIC] — [INDIGNANT PROTEST AGAINST MODERN HUNS].
All through Belgium and all through the country of the Franco-German border line are towns and cities filled with treasures of art and history—some of the richest, indeed, that centuries of civilization have amassed. Under the guns of both sides of the mighty conflict these paintings and shrines and storied buildings have been exposed to destruction, and many of them have been wantonly sacrificed, shattered beyond hope of restoration.
Under the latest Hague proposals, Article XXVIII, historic monuments are supposed to be respected even by warring nations, yet both Germany and France have accused each other of violating this convention. The whole of civilized humanity rises in protest against such sacrilege.
Among all the black crimes of the German invasion of Belgium none is blacker than the sack and burning of Louvain, the fairest city of Belgium and the intellectual metropolis of the Low Countries. According to a bitter statement of Frank Jewett Mather, the well-known American art critic, “Louvain contained more beautiful works of art than the Prussian nation has produced in its entire history.”
ART TREASURES OF HISTORIC CITY
There was hardly a building within the ramparts but breathed the air of some romance of the Middle Ages or marked a stepping-stone in its stirring history. Once before war robbed it of its commercial prestige, only to permit it to rise, phœnix-like, as the center of learning during the sixteenth century. At the opening of the present war it still boasted of the largest university in Belgium, in which thousands of antique volumes and prints were stored. Its museums and its churches housed scores of paintings of the old Flemish masters.
Louvain has passed through successive periods of culture and barbarity ever since Julius Caesar established a permanent camp there during his campaigns against the Belgians and the Germans. In the eleventh century it became the residence of the long line of Dukes of Brabant, and was the capital until Brussels wrested this distinction from it during an uprising of weavers against their feudal masters. In the fourteenth century it had gained a population of between 100,000 and 150,000, and there were no fewer than 2,400 woolen manufactories. The weavers were a turbulent lot, however, and when they rose against the Duke Wencelaus he conquered them and forced thousands of them to flee to Holland and England. It was then that Brussels became the capital and Louvain lost its prestige as a center of the cloth-making industry.
The Voice of the Cologne Church Speaks: