unwilling cattle on a market day. Some of the men, after a few words between the officer and the escorts, were marched off under fixed bayonets behind the railway station. Then we heard volleys, and the soldiers returned. Then the train moved out, and the last we saw of the doomed city was an immense red glare in the gathering darkness.”
What M. Carton de Wiart Told Me.
Before leaving the subject of Louvain it is necessary for me to chronicle the following, which was told me by M. Carton de Wiart, the Belgian Minister of Justice. “As to the sacking of Louvain,” he stated, “we have here a statement dated August 30th, which has been handed to the Commission by a person of universal repute in Belgium, and which has been telegraphed to us. On August 30th that person went from Brussels to Louvain. On the high-road, when he got to a place called Weerde St. George, he saw only burning villages and peasants beside themselves with terror. When he reached Louvain and got to the American College—a large number of American students, young priests, and medical students come to Louvain—he found that fire had destroyed the whole town except the town hall and city station. This gentleman noted that on Sunday last the Germans kept on kindling new fires and placing straw so as to carry the fire farther. The cathedral and the theatre had been destroyed, and had collapsed completely. So had the famous library, one of the most precious in the world, especially as regards manuscripts and works of art. The town,” he says, “presents the aspect of an old ruined city, a city like Pompeii. In the midst of this scene of desolation the only people you could see were drunken soldiers carrying bottles of wine and liqueurs in their arms, and officers themselves sitting in the streets around tables drinking like their men.”
The “Times” Speaks Out.
Finally I give a quotation from the Times:—
“Deep and deadly must be the vengeance which the defenders of civilization will exact from these new apostles of brutality. Even Attila had his better side. He spared Milan. It has been said of him that, though he destroyed cities without remorse, he respected the laws of nations as they were understood in his day. The modern Attila respects neither the laws of nations nor the laws of God. His evil deeds cry aloud to Heaven and to the horror-struck watching nations. The infamous crime of the destruction of Louvain is without a parallel even in the dark ages. The harmless civil population had been disarmed a week ago. The German garrison at the gates of the town fired upon another force of their own countrymen. To conceal their blunder, they laid the blame upon the helpless townspeople. No denials were listened to. Some of the men of Louvain were shot, the rest were made prisoners, the women and children were flung into trains and carried off to an unknown destination, and the city was razed to the ground. Louvain has ceased to exist. A town of forty thousand inhabitants, bigger than Crewe or Dover or Colchester or Keighley, has been completely wiped out. The wickedness of this abominable act shall be expiated to the uttermost when the day of reckoning comes.
“Until now we have maintained an attitude of deliberate reserve upon the innumerable tales of German atrocities which have reached us. We published without comment the unanswerable list of shocking excesses committed by the German troops, which was sent to England by the Belgian authorities. When a German Zeppelin cast bombs upon ill-fated women asleep in their beds at Antwerp, we did no more than explain the bearings of international law upon conduct which has met with universal reprobation in Europe and America. But now the real object of German savagery is self-revealed, not only by the effacement of Louvain, but by the shameful admissions sent forth from the wireless station at Berlin. Last Thursday night the following official notification regarding Belgium came vibrating through the air:—
“ ‘The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civil population has been to interfere with unstinting severity and to create examples which by their frightfulness would be a warning to the whole country.’
“Such is the cynical nature of the German apologia for the destruction of Louvain. Such is the character of the warfare of the modern Huns. They seek to strike terror into the hearts of their foes by methods which belong to the days of the old barbaric hosts, who were thought to have vanished from the world for ever. There must be no mistake about the opportionment of blame for this and numberless other crimes. We have listened too long to the bleatings of professors bemused by the false glamour of a philosophy which the Germans themselves have thrust aside.
“The Kaiser and his people are alike responsible for the acts of their Government and their troops, and there can be no differentiation when the day of reckoning comes. The Kaiser could stop these things with a word. Instead, he pronounces impious benedictions upon them. Daily he appeals for the blessings of God upon the dreadful deeds which are staining the face of Western Europe—the ravaged villages, the hapless non-combatants hanged or shot, the women and children torn from their beds by cowards and made to walk before them under threats of all the infamies which have eternally disgraced German ‘valour.’”