Malines station gives you an idea of what the whole town looks like. A large placard tells you that the town is now called Mecheln, and underneath it is a large picture of the general who ordered the shelling of the town, but met his death the same day. German soldiers keep the frame constantly decorated with laurel branches. The glass roof is torn by an enormous hole, through which the snow enters freely. The waiting-room has also an extra aperture, and a bomb has taken away every bit of the stucco work and left the walls completely bare. Malines was not set on fire; all the ruin brought on it was due to the blind violence of the high explosives. Evidently they are not as destructive as the people who have invented them, and the town does not look half as bad as Louvain.
Though very few of the houses are untouched, the general aspect of the quiet town has not changed much. Only one or two of the large domes and steeples which used to emerge from the roofs of the small houses have disappeared, and the unfinished tower of St. Rombaut has altered its massive silhouette a little.
Now and again I see deep holes, caused by shells, and houses which have lost a corner, and allow a glance of their domestic life through a large crevice. Here a quiet "béguinage" has received a projectile in full, and from the street I can see a whitewashed room with a decapitated painted crucifix, and hanging to a nail a black bonnet of the old Brabant country woman.
I think of the tragedy of the poor old lady who received that unexpected visit in the very room in which she had chosen to end her life. The "béguinages" of Malines are said to be the most strict of the whole of Belgium, and in some of them the old women live for years without seeing an outsider. Where are now the poor old things who thought every day's life full enough of private worries, and have now been reached in their seclusion by this dreadful catastrophe?
Curiously enough, Malines, which can be considered as the religious metropolis of Belgium, establishes a real record in the way of sieges, pillages, and plunders. French, English, Dutch have often taken and half destroyed the town, and ultimately Napoleon dismantled it in 1804. Some old twelfth and thirteenth century houses which have resisted all previous trials have been fatally hit now. The Grand' Place, which used to delight the lovers of old Flemish constructions, has greatly suffered, and the shells with subtle perversity have spared some ugly modern buildings and raged on what centuries had respected.
Alas! these descriptions of destroyed towns, of murder and pillage; the stories of unbelievable atrocities, even only those which I know are true, the pictures of misery and famine which nobody would have believed possible in our times, could be continued page after page.
But what happened in the towns is nothing compared with what happened in the country. There, far from the control of high officers, the blonde beast has given way to all the brutal follies of which the Hun is now known to be capable.
I have seen and heard things that disgust keeps me from writing; things compared with which the excesses of the French Revolution, the bloodthirsty pleasures of some barbarian kings, the exploits of some notorious brigands, are but the A B C of an art in which the German army has certainly reached the highest possible standard of perfection.