tured
by another German brigade and compelled to march to Malines, where they
were finally liberated.

"An eye witness testified that he met nothing except burned villages,
crazed peasants, lifting to each comer their arms, as mark of
submission. From each house was hanging a white flag, even from those
that had been set on fire, and rags of them were found hanging from the
ruins. The fire began a little above the American College, and the city
is entirely destroyed, with the exception of the town hall and the
depot. Today the fire continues and the Germans, instead of trying to
stop it--seem rather to maintain it by throwing straw into the flames,
as I have myself seen behind the Hotel de Ville. The Cathedral and the
theatre have been destroyed and fallen in, and also the library. The
town resembles an old city in ruins, in the midst of which drunken
soldiers are circulating, carrying around bottles of wine and liquor;
the officers themselves being installed in arm chairs, sitting around
tables and drinking like their own men.

"In the streets dead horses are decaying, horses which are completely
inflated, and the smell of the fire and the decaying animals is such
that it has followed me for a long time."

And the policy which developed such outrageous conduct on the part of
the Kaiser's soldiers in the early days of the war, against which
Belgium protested to the world, inspired brutal acts, ruthlessness and
cruelty at every stage and during every period of the war. Nowhere is
there written a single line which tells of the humanitarian acts of the
German soldiers. Those who fight against them acknowledge their stoical
bravery, the efficiency of the army, the navy and the people as a whole,
but there is no reflection of refined instincts in any of the acts of
Germany or the Germans.

THE AMERICAN MINISTER'S REPORT.

Of those conditions which existed in Belgium when the German soldiers
overran the country, America's own minister to the devastated country,
Brand Whitlock, sent a report to the State Department in the beginning
of 1917, when President Wilson was protesting against the treatment
accorded the helpless people of Belgium by the Germans.

Mr. Whitlock tells how the Germans determined to put the Belgians thrown
out of employment to work for them. "In August," says the report,
dealing with the treatment of the helpless Belgians, "Von Hindenburg was
appointed supreme commander. He is said to have criticis