on the floor. It was not possible to
obtain food, and water was as scarce. At Graesbeek, ten miles from
Brussels, we first saw houses on fire. They continued with us to
Liege.

Village after village had been completely wrecked. In his march to the
sea Sherman lived on the country. He did not destroy it, and as
against the burning of Columbia must be placed to the discredit of the
Germans the wiping out of an entire countryside.

For many miles we saw procession after procession of peasants
fleeing from one burning village, which had been their home, to other
villages, to find only blackened walls and smouldering ashes. In no
part of northern Europe is there a countryside fairer than that
between Aix-la-Chapelle and Brussels, but the Germans had made of
it a graveyard. It looked as though a cyclone had uprooted its houses,
gardens, and orchards and a prairie fire had followed.

At seven o'clock in the evening we arrived at what for six hundred
years had been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it,
and to hide their work kept us locked in the railroad carriages. But the
story was written against the sky, was told to us by German soldiers
incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of women
and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their
way to be shot.

The day before the Germans had sentenced Louvain to become a
wilderness, and with German system and love of thoroughness they
left Louvain an empty, blackened shell. The reason for this appeal to
the torch and the execution of non-combatants, as given to Mr.
Whitlock and myself on the morning I left Brussels by General von
Lutwitz, the military governor, was this: The day before, while the
German military commander of the troops in Louvain was at the Hotel
de Ville talking to the burgomaster, a son of the burgomaster, with an
automatic pistol, shot the chief of staff and German staff surgeons.

Lutwitz claimed this was the signal for the civil guard, in civilian
clothes on the roofs, to fire upon the German soldiers in the open
square below. He said also the Belgians had quick-firing guns,
brought from Antwerp. As for a week the Germans had occupied
Louvain and closely guarded all approaches, the story that there was
any gun-running is absurd.

"Fifty Germans were killed and wounded," said Lutwitz, "and for that
Louvain must be wiped out--so!" In pantomime with his fist he swept
the papers across his table.

"The