What I Saw in Berlin and Other European Capitals During Wartime

by Piermarini

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It was five o'clock in the afternoon when I walked out of Louvain station on to a muddy piece of uneven ground surrounded by ruins which were once the station square. It was a grey day, and a few stray flakes of snow were blown by the icy whirlwind in all directions. The weather was perfectly consonant with the general aspect of the town.

Right and left I could discover nothing but ruins; it was hard to tell which was the road and which the site of former buildings. Enormous masses of calcinated bricks and stones are all that remain of the houses which have collapsed; as for the others which are still standing, their appearance is still more tragic. All the inside part, the ceilings, the staircases, the roofs, have been burned away, and the outer wall, all out of perpendicular, still shows the pots of flowers, the iron bars, and the metallic parts of the shutters which were burned away.

Entire rows of houses protrude on the street as if they are going to collapse at any minute; others lean backwards just as if they were frightened; others are all leaning on the right or the left side as if a terrible wind had forced them into that unnatural position.

Here at another spot the walls of two houses touch each other at the top, forming a sort of pointed arch. The steeple of a little church leans far more than the famous Pisa Tower.

From every window there hangs a curious sort of transparent stalactite, which at first sight looks like an icicle, and is formed by the window glass melted in the dreadful heat. A three-floor house has collapsed completely except for the wall facing the street, and at one of the second-floor windows a bird-cage, suspended by a chain, is still hanging, and the blizzard rattles it continuously to and fro. For the fire has got a sort of sinister humour of its own. Here it has destroyed completely the powerful masonry of a fifteenth-century house whose walls were four feet thick, and next door it has blackened without burning a fragile-looking cottage, and even left a white and red check curtain hanging from the window. Further down, a butcher's shop has completely disappeared, but a large metallic sign with an enormous bull painted on it is still at its place, sustained, a miracle of balance, by the frame of the burned awning.

I walk down the Rue de la Station to the Grand' Place. Here was the fine theatre in Italian renaissance; now only the four pillars of the front mark the place where it was standing. Farther down, near the gigantic ruins of the University and the Library, is the once-famous Cathedral of St. Peter.

Up to a few months ago this building was one of the most beautiful examples of the Flemish florid-Gothic. All lovers of old things remember its windows, made more elegant than those of any other Gothic cathedral by a sort of carved balcony, its steep roof, its solid-looking, severe front without the traditional portals. Now all this has disappeared. The roof has collapsed. The wonderfully painted stained windows are no more. The carvings have been reduced to shapeless calcinated stones, and the bricks underneath, re-baked by the flames, show themselves as red as a fresh wound. A notice stuck on what was a beautifully carved oak door tells me that the entrance to the cathedral is strictly "verboten." But a couple of marks make the soldier on guard close both eyes, and he lets me in after having warned me not to say a word or make any noise, as pieces of burned wood and of cornice are dropping down at the slightest movement.

Inside one walks on a bed of rubbish four to seven feet deep. The huge pillars stand without supporting any vault, like useless date trees. The famous tabernacle of Mathieu de Layens has been cracked by the heat, and tattered blackened pieces of canvas hang from the walls once covered with paint. As for the twenty-four little statues which used to decorate the choir, they have disappeared. I don't know if they were taken away by the priests before the destruction of the cathedral or stolen by the Germans after it.

Outside, the streets are nearly deserted. A few soldiers, a few ragged people begging for a copper or a piece of bread, these I see; a few of the old inhabitants searching the remains of their homes and contemplating, with the look of somebody who sees an old friend, every bit of metal, every fragment of pottery they happen to find. They have constructed temporary shelters and collected therein what the flames have spared. Some are looking under their house ruins for a member of the family who has disappeared. Every day a new corpse is found. In every square are fresh graves, and the very day of my visit five more victims of German violence had been buried right in the middle of the station square, all round the statue of Van der Weyer, which has been respected probably as an homage to its ugliness. The Kommandant of Louvain insisted that the victims should be buried there, and not in the cemetery, "to set a good example!"