What I Saw in Berlin and Other European Capitals During Wartime

by Piermarini

In this phrase is the reason of the destruction of the harmless little town—a reason which has puzzled the whole world.

For the most dreadful part of the destruction of Louvain is that there has been no fighting, no shelling, nothing of what we generally understand by the word war. The town had been quietly occupied by the Germans, and they forced the population to leave their houses without carrying anything with them. People who tried to save anything were robbed of what they had taken with them, the earrings were pulled out of the women's ears (I have seen a body with both the ear-lobes torn in two), the pockets searched, and in more than one case anybody who was found to be carrying something was immediately shot.

Petrol and some other new liquid combustible quite recently discovered in a Berlin laboratory, and which the Louvain people have christened "Colofogne du Diable," were poured abundantly on the whole town, except, perhaps, on twenty houses inhabited by Germans. I saw, in one of the station rooms, the fire engines which have been used for this purpose, fire engines which bear the arms of the City of Louvain, and which, with cruel irony, were used to set fire to the town they had been created to save. Specially made bombs were thrown into every house, and the Germans retired outside the town on the great boulevard to enjoy a spectacle really worthy of Nero.

But at Louvain the Germans have surpassed Nero. While the town was still burning all the population, regardless of age or sex, was arranged in a single line near Mont César. And then the most dreadful thing happened.

The Romans, to subdue soldiers' rebellions, invented a punishment which always seemed to the world the limit of cruelty—decimation.

The Germans at Louvain did the same thing, but they beat the Romans. Every third man was the victim. I met a gentleman who had been twice through this ordeal. He was still young, but his hair was grey, and his eyes had in them a far-off expression of terror. Near the cathedral somebody pointed out to me a young woman gone mad through having lost her husband and brother in this way.

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From Louvain to Malines the country shows all the signs of dreadful desolation. Flooded land covered with ice, under which the dead lie by hundreds, pieces of wood crowned by Belgian képis or Prussian helmets marking the grave of officers—this is the sight. Flooded trenches and rusty wirework, burned or cut trees, telegraphic poles smashed by shells, and again burned houses and windmills, some of the large wings of which have been amputated, and little ruined châteaux on the top of which waves a German flag.

The train passes the Dyle on a temporary bridge constructed at the side of the old one destroyed by the retreating Belgians. Here were many large greenhouses in which the cultivation of the orchid had reached its highest degree of perfection. Now they look like enormous cages, every one of their windows having been smashed.