I am not ashamed to confess that when I, an Irish Catholic, walked into the Grand’ Place and saw the stamp of Berlin imprinted on those good grey walls I did not think at once of material injury, or money, or subscriptions. What came was anger against the desecration of a holy place. My mind said to me, “This is how Nietzsche has, from his grave, spat, as he wished to spit, upon Nazareth.” A picture came of that sinister Quixote, who made cruelty his sacrament, and who was yet so humanly dear in some of his moods, standing behind a great Krupp howitzer and shouting, “Charlottenburg contra Christ. I back Charlottenburg!”
One notices in some of the English papers protests against the too ready acceptance of unanalysed and unconfirmed “atrocities.” So liable is panic to mix myth with fact that I have pleaded more than once for the constitution of an International Commission to examine all the evidence. But in the meantime we find it difficult to divest ourselves of the faculty of inference. If you come, during time of war, upon a civilian, hanging by the neck, with his hands tied behind his back, and a fire burning under him, the theory of suicide or accident does not seem to embrace the full scope of the fact. A similar process of reasoning forces you to the conclusion that the Germans would not have hit Malines Cathedral so often if they had not aimed at it. The other buildings struck by shells are either on the line of fire to the Grand’ Place or in its immediate neighbourhood.
The city was three times bombarded. Unlike Termonde, it is open and without the least trace of fortification. None of the bombardments achieved any military object. No attempt was made to capture, fire, shell, or in any way diminish in efficiency the State railway works. I fear that the case looks complete. The Germans deliberately broke through the laws of civilised war, and, just as deliberately, broke through the walls of the cathedral.
To describe in detail, and to put an estimate on the damage done, is a task for experts with ample time at their command. The Belgian Commission were to open a formal enquiry on the day following my visit, and kindly invited me to accompany them, but it was impossible. The following invoice of Hunnery is, therefore, only provisional. There is not a whole pane of glass left in the cathedral. The middle lateral window on the assailed flank of the edifice was itself struck; the others were shattered by the detonation. The stained glass is, I believe, modern, but as you saw it lying heaped on the pavement, like the shards of a rainbow, it looked beautiful enough to have been spared. A great gulf has been torn through the groined roof near its junction with the tower. The tower itself is blotched here and there a pallid white by the exploding shells. The great clock, the largest in Belgium, had been also struck, and its hands flapped in the wind like torn ribbons. The famous carillon, or peal of bells, does not, however, seem to have been injured.
In the left aisle the charred remnant of a canvas still hung in its frame, but what the picture was no one could tell me. The pavement itself was torn up here and there like ground uprooted by swine. The equestrian monument near the southerly entrance has, as to the horse, suffered decapitation, and the figure has lost an arm. Fragments chipped off mouldings and capitals lie about in desolate heaps. And to complete the desolation, all the precious objects have been removed from the cathedral as from the other churches and public buildings. The ciboria, the chalices, the candlesticks, the rich orphreyed vestments have been removed to Antwerp.
Thither have gone Van Dyck’s “Crucifixion,” and Rubens’s “Miraculous Draught of Fishes.” In its own way the most bizarre inhibition imposed by the war is that which prevents you from seeing a Rubens in Antwerp. They are all hidden away from the cultured burglars of Berlin. The “carnal ideal,” which Verhaeren discovers behind the great strokes of his spiritual ancestor would, it is feared, prove irresistible to Attila.
On the day of my visit Cardinal Mercier had returned. I had last met him at Louvain—not in the flesh, but in his books. This master of psychology is one of those who have dared to think that the Latin definiteness of Thomas of Aquin is closer to the sound soul of Europe than the fog of Koenigsberg, or the cloudy intoxication of Hegel. The scholar, called to rule, has also been called to suffer. He was passing through the Grand’ Place as a long procession of women stood formed up outside the door of the municipal offices waiting wretchedly for bread. There was a stir, cheering, excitement which he repressed with a gesture. To those who approached him he said: “Your cheers are due to the army and the King, not to me. I am a Belgian citizen, no more.”
The ruin of the civil population does not, as in Termonde, brand itself on your eyes, but it is, of course, none the less real. The city is a mere cemetery of shutters. The bombardments came after Louvain had been taught its lesson, and the Malinois did not stop to write notes on the text of that lesson. They fled en masse. One sees them in the rain and wind-swept bathing machines at Ostend. You hear them at Folkestone and in London. I saw still another packed trainload leaving Malines for Heyst-sur-Mer, from which many will disperse over the littoral generally, and others will filter into England. In Malines itself a few cafés, a few bakeries, and other shops of prime necessity are open. Everything else is as in a city of plague.
Consider what that means. It means, very bluntly, the triumph of German terrorism. If the Hague Convention is worth anything, and is not merely another “scrap of paper,” the lace-makers and the chair-makers of Malines should, under its protection, be now at work, and not in forced idleness and exile.
Readers must be weary of hearing the Prussian method characterised as one of scientific blackguardism. But that is what it is. There is nothing incoherent, tumultuous, or spasmodic about it; it goes on a well-formulated principle. And it has succeeded. By producing a panic among the civil population it has created the problem of the refugees. It inflicts day by day on Belgium an economic loss, the size of which cannot even be guessed at. Can nothing be done to check its operation? Can nothing be done to guarantee Malines against the fate of Termonde? The Belgian Commission in its last report stated the case with such concentrated force that no apology is needed for recalling their words—