hat is a remark I heard from noblemen and common soldiers
alike. Such acts are beyond the understanding of the Belgian people.
Their soldiers are kindly, good-humored, fearless. Alien women and
children would be safe in their hands. They do not see why the Germans
bring suffering to the innocent.

A few understand. They know it is a scientific panic which the German
army was seeking to cultivate. They see that these acts are not done in
the wilful abandon of a few drunken soldiers, beyond discipline, but
that they belong to a cool, careful method by means of which the German
staff hoped to reduce a population to servitude. The Germans regard
these mutilations as pieces of necessary surgery. The young blond
barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October 4 that a German captain
came and cried like a baby in the taproom on the evening of September 7,
after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle. To her fanciful, untrained
mind he was thinking of his own wife and children. So, at least, she
thought as she watched him, after serving him in his thirst.

One of the sentries patted the shoulder of the peasant at Melle when he
learned that the man had had the three members of his family done to
death. Personally, he was sorry for the man, but orders were orders.

[Illustration: CHURCH IN TERMONDE WHICH THE WRITER SAW.

The Germans burned this church and four others, a hospital, an
orphanage, and 1,100 homes, house by house. Priests, nuns and churches
irritated the German Army. This photograph was taken by Radclyffe
Dugmore, who accompanied the writer, to witness the methodical
destruction.]

I spent September 13 and September 23 in Termonde. Ten days before my
first visit Termonde was a pretty town of 11,000 inhabitants. On their
first visit the Germans burned eleven hundred of the fifteen hundred
houses. They burned the Church of St. Benedict, the Church of St.
Rocus, three other churches, a hospital, and an orphanage. They burned
that town not by accident of shell fire and general conflagration, but
methodically, house by house. In the midst of charred ruins I came on
single houses standing, many of them, and on their doors was German
writing in chalk--"Nicht Verbrennen. Gute Leute wohnen hier." Sometimes
it would be simply "Nicht Verbrennen," sometimes only "Gute Leute," but
always that piece of German script was enough to save that house, though
to the right and left of it were ruins. On several of the saved houses
the