These assaults on houses passed over inevitably into wholesale incendiarism. “The German troops,” as the Editors of the German White Book remark in their summarising report on the events at Louvain, “had to resort to energetic counter-measures. In accordance with the threats, the inhabitants who had taken part in the attack were shot, and the houses from which shots had been fired were set on fire. The spreading of the fire to other houses also and the destruction of some streets could not be avoided. In this way the Cathedral” (i. e., the Collegiate Church of St. Pierre) “also caught fire....”

There is a map in the German White Book which shows the quarters burnt down. The incendiarism started in the Station Square, and spread along the Boulevard de Tirlemont as far as the Tirlemont Gate. It was renewed across the railway and devastated the suburbs to the east. Then it was extended up the Rue de la Station into the heart of the town, and here the Church of St. Pierre was destroyed, and the University Halles with the priceless University Library—not by mischance, as the German Report alleges, but by the deliberate work of German troops, employing the same incendiary apparatus as had been used already at Visé, Liége and elsewhere.[227]

The burning was directed by a German officer from the Vieux Marché, a large open space near the centre of the town, and by another group of officers stationed in the Place du Peuple.[228] The burning here is described by a German officer[229] (whose evidence on other points has been quoted above). “The Company,” he states, “continued to fire into the houses. The fire of the inhabitants (sic) gradually died down. Thereupon the German soldiers broke in the doors of the houses and set the houses on fire, flinging burning petroleum lamps into the houses or striking off the gas-taps, setting light to the gas which rushed out and throwing table-cloths and curtains into the flames. Here and there benzine was also employed as a means of ignition. The order to set fire to the houses was given out by Colonel von Stubenrauch, whose voice I distinguished....”

In the Rue de la Station the Germans set the houses on fire with incendiary bombs. This was seen by a Belgian witness,[230] and is confirmed by the German officer just cited, who, in the Place du Peuple, “heard repeatedly the detonation of what appeared to be heavy guns” round about him. “I supposed,” he proceeds, “that artillery was firing; but since there was none present, there is only one explanation for this—that the inhabitants (sic) also threw hand-grenades.”

In the Rue de Manège[231] another Belgian witness saw a soldier pouring inflammable liquid over a house from a bucket, and this though a German military surgeon, present on the spot, admitted that in that house there had been nobody firing. Soldiers are also stated to have been seen[232] with a complete incendiary equipment (syringe, hatchet, etc.), and with “Gott mit Uns” and “Company of Incendiaries” blazoned on their belts. The Germans deny that the Church of St. Pierre was deliberately burnt, and allege that the fire spread to it from private houses;[233] but a Dutch witness[234] saw it burning while the adjoining houses were still intact. There is less evidence for the deliberate burning of the University Halles, containing the Library, but it is significant that the building was completely consumed in one night (a result hardly possible without artificial means), and at 11.0 p.m., in the middle of the burning, an officer answered a Belgian monk, who protested, that it was “By Order.”[235] The manuscripts and early printed books in the Library were one of the treasures of Europe. The whole collection of 250,000 volumes was the intellectual capital of the University, without which it could not carry on its work. Every volume and manuscript was destroyed. The Germans pride themselves on saving the Hôtel-de-Ville, but they saved it because it was the seat of the German Kommandantur, and this only suggests that, had they desired, they could have prevented the destruction of the other buildings as well.

As the houses took fire the inhabitants met their fate. Some were asphyxiated in the cellars where they had taken refuge from the shooting, or were burnt alive as they attempted to escape from their homes.[236] Others were shot down by the German troops as they ran out into the street,[237] or while they were fighting the flames.[238] “The franc-tireurs,” as they are called by the German officer in the Place du Peuple,[239] “were without exception evil-looking figures, such as I have never seen elsewhere in all my life. They were shot down by the German posts stationed below....”

Others, again, tried to save themselves by climbing garden walls.[240] “I, my mother and my servants,” states one of these,[241] “took refuge at A.’s, whose cellars are vaulted and therefore afforded us a better protection than mine. A little later we withdrew to A.’s stables, where about 30 people, who had got there by climbing the garden walls, were to be found. Some of these poor wretches had had to climb 20 walls. A ring came at the bell. We opened the door. Several civilians flung themselves under the porch. The Germans were firing upon them from the street.”

“When we were crossing a particularly high wall,” states another victim,[242] “my wife was on the top of the wall and I was helping her to get down, when a party of 15 Germans came up with rifles and revolvers. They told us to come down. My wife did not follow as quickly as they wished. One of them made a lunge at her with his bayonet. I seized the blade of the bayonet and stopped the lunge. The German soldier then tried to stab me in the face with his bayonet....

“They kept hitting us with the butt-ends of their rifles—the women and children as well as the men. They struck us on the elbows because they said our arms were not raised high enough....

“We were driven in this way through a burning house to the Place de la Station. There were a number of prisoners already there. In front of the station entrance there were the corpses of three civilians killed by rifle fire. The women and the children were separated. The women were put on one side and the men on the other. One of the German soldiers pushed my wife with the butt-end of his rifle, so that she was compelled to walk on the three corpses. Her shoes were full of blood....

“Other prisoners were being continually brought in. I saw one prisoner with a bayonet-wound behind his ear. A boy of fifteen had a bayonet-wound in his throat in front.... The priests were treated more brutally than the rest. I saw one belaboured with the butt-ends of rifles. Some German soldiers came up to me sniggering, and said that all the women were going to be raped.... They explained themselves by gestures.... The streets were full of empty wine bottles....

“An officer told me that he was merely executing orders, and that he himself would be shot if he did not execute them....”

The battue of civilians through the streets was the final horror of that night. The massacre began with the murder of M. David-Fischbach. He was a man of property, a benefactor of the University and the town. Since the outbreak of war he had given 10,000 francs to the Red Cross. Since the German occupation he had entertained German officers in his house, which stood in the Rue de la Station opposite the Statue of Juste-Lipse, and about 9.0 o’clock that evening he had gone to bed.

“Close to the Monument Square,” states Dr. Berghausen, the German military surgeon who was responsible for M. David-Fischbach’s death,[243] “I saw a German soldier lying dead on the ground.... His comrades told me that the shot had been fired from the corner house belonging to David-Fischbach. Thereupon I myself, with my servant, broke in the door of the house and met first the owner of the house, old David-Fischbach. I challenged him concerning the soldier who had been murdered.... Old David-Fischbach declared he knew nothing about it. Thereupon his son, young Fischbach, came downstairs from the first floor, and from the porter’s lodge appeared an old servant. I immediately took father, son, and servant with me into the street. At that moment a tumult arose in the street, because a fearful fusillade had opened from a few houses on the same side of the street against the soldiers standing by the Monument and against myself. In the darkness I then lost sight of David-Fischbach, with his son and servant....”

The soldiers set the old man with his back against the statue. Standing with his arms raised, he had to watch his house set on fire. Then he was bayonetted and finally shot to death. His son was shot, too. His house was burnt to the ground, and a servant asphyxiated in the cellar.[244]

“Later,” adds Dr. Berghausen, “I met Major von Manteuffel with the hostages, and all four or five of us saw the dead soldier lying in front of the monument and, a few steps further on, old David-Fischbach. I assumed that the comrades of the soldier who had been killed ... had at once inflicted punishment on the owner of the house....”

The corpse was also seen by a professor’s wife who made her way to the Hôpital St.-Thomas—the old man’s white beard was stained with blood.[245]

The massacre spread. Six workmen returning from their work were shot down from behind.[246] A woman was shot as she was beating for admittance on a door.[247] A man had his hands tied behind his back, and was shot as he ran down the street.[248] Another witness saw 20 men shot.[249] One saw 19 corpses,[250] and corpses were also seen with their hands tied behind their backs, like the victim mentioned above.[251] There was the body of a woman cut in two, with a child still alive beside her.[252] Other children had been murdered, and were lying dead.[253] There was the body of another murdered woman, and a girl of fourteen who had been wounded and was being carried to hospital. A German soldier beckoned a Dutch witness into a shop,[254] and showed him the shop-keeper’s body in the back-room, in a night-shirt, with a bullet-wound through the head.

These were the “evil-looking franc-tireurs” whom the German soldiers shot down at sight. Inhabitants of Louvain dragged as prisoners through the streets[255] recognised the corpses of people they knew. Here a bootmaker lay,[256] here a hairdresser,[256] here a professor. The corpse of Professor Lenertz was lying in front of his house in the Boulevard de Tirlemont. It was recognised by Dr. Noyons, one of his colleagues (though a Dutchman by nationality), who was serving in the Hôpital St.-Thomas, and so escaped himself.[257] “On the 27th,” states a Belgian lady,[258] “M. Lenertz’ body was still lying on the Boulevard. When his wife and children were evicted by the Germans and came out of their house, members of the family had to stand in front of the body to hide it from Madame Lenertz’ sight.”

The dead were lying in every quarter of the town. In the Boulevard de Tirlemont there were six or seven more.[259] There was one at the end of the Rue du Manège.[260] But the greatest number were in the Station Square, where they were seen by all the civilian prisoners herded thither this night and the following day.[261] Their murder is described by a German sergeant-major[262] who was fighting in the neighbourhood of the Station. “Various civilians,” he remarks, “were led off by my men, and after judgment had been given against them by the Commandant, they were shot in the Square in front of the Station. In accordance with orders, I myself helped to set fire to various houses, after having in every case previously convinced myself that no one was left in them. Towards midnight the work was done, and the Company returned to the station buildings, before which were lying shot about 15 inhabitants of the town.”

The slaughter itself increased the thirst for blood. A Dutch witness[263] met a German column marching in from Aerschot. “The soldiers were beside themselves with rage at the sight of the corpses, and cried: ‘Schweinhunde! Schweinhunde!’ They regarded me with threatening eyes. I passed on my way....”

The soldiers in their frenzy respected no one. The Hostel for Spanish students in the Rue de la Station was burnt down, though it was protected by the Spanish flag. Father Catala, the Superior of the Hostel and formerly Vice-Consul of Spain, barely escaped with his life. There was no mercy either for the old or the sick. A retired barrister, bedridden with paralysis, had his house burnt over his head, and was brought to the Hôpital St.-Thomas to die. Another old man, more than eighty years old and in his last illness, was cast out by the soldiers into the street, and died in the Hôpital St.-Thomas next day.[264] An aged concierge was cast alive into the blazing ruins of the house it was his duty to guard.[265] So it went on till dawn, when the havoc was completed by salvoes of artillery. “At four o’clock in the morning,” states an officer of the Ninth German Reserve Corps Staff,[266] “the Army Corps moved out to battle. We did not enter the main streets, but advanced along an avenue.... As the road carrying our lines of communication was continuously fired on, the order was given to clear the town by force. Two guns were sent with 150 shells. The two guns, firing from the Railway Station, swept the streets with shells. Thus at least the quarter surrounding the Railway Station was secured, and this made it possible to conduct the supply-columns through the town....”

It was now the morning of August 26th. At dawn Mgr. Coenraets and Father Parijs, the hostages of the preceding night, were placed under escort and marched round the City once more. If the firing continued the hostages were to be shot. They had to proclaim this themselves to the inhabitants from point to point of the town, and they were kept at this task till far on in the day.[267] The inhabitants, meanwhile, were paying the penalty for the shots which not they but the Germans had already fired.

In one street after another the people were dragged from their houses, and those not slaughtered out of hand were driven by the soldiers to the Station Square. “I only had slippers on,” states one victim,[268] “and no hat or waistcoat. On the way to the Station Square, soldiers kicked me and hit me with the butt-ends of their rifles, and shouted: ‘Oh, you swine! Another who shot at us! You swine!’ My hands were tied behind my back with a cord, and when I cried: ‘Oh, God, you are hurting me,’ a soldier spat on me.”—“We had to go in front of the soldiers,” adds this witness’s wife,[269] “holding our hands above our heads. All the ladies who lived in the Boulevard—invalids or not—were taken prisoners. One of them, an old lady of 85, who could scarcely walk, was dragged from her cellar with her maid.”

When they reached the Station Square the men were herded to one side, the women and children to the other. It was done by an officer with a loaded revolver.[270] “We were separated from our families,” states one of the men;[271] “we were knocked about and blows were rained on us from rifle butts; the women and children and the men were isolated from one another....”

The men’s pockets were rifled. Purses, keys, penknives and so on were taken from them.[272] One gentleman’s servant had 7,805 francs taken from his bag, and was given a receipt for 7,000 francs in exchange.[273] This was the preliminary to a “trial,” conducted by Captain Albrecht,[274] a staff officer of the Ninth Reserve Corps. “The soldiers,” states a German tradesman who acted as Captain Albrecht’s interpreter,[275] “brought forward the civilians whom they had seized.... In all about 600 persons may have been brought in, the lives of at least 500 of whom were spared, because no clear proof of their guilt seemed to be established at the trial. These persons were set on one side.... Captain Albrecht followed the course—I imagine, by the command of his superiors—of ordering that those among the men brought forward upon whom either a weapon or an identification mark was discovered, or in whose case it was established by at least two witnesses that they had fired upon the German troops, should be shot. It is an utter impossibility, according to my firm conviction, that any innocent man should have lost his life....”

But was there really “clear proof of guilt” in any of these cases? Not one of these “identification marks” (assumed to establish that the bearer was a member of the Belgian Army) has been brought forward as material evidence by the German Government. And was the other material evidence so clear? One man, for instance,[276] had a German bullet in his pocket which he had picked up in the street. “He was shot down, and two of his comrades had to make a pit and bury him in the place where he was shot.”[277] One priest was shot “because he had purposely enticed the soldiers, according to their testimony, under the fire of the franc-tireurs.”[278] Two other priests were shot “for distributing ammunition to civilians,”[279] but this was only a story heard from General Headquarters at second-hand. The witness who tells it was sent with a squad “to set on fire two hotels in the Station Square and drive out their inmates. The chief culprits found, apparently, a way of escape in good time over the roofs, since only the proprietor of one of the hotels presented himself at 5.0 o’clock in the morning, and very shortly afterwards received the reward he deserved.” But what was the proof that he deserved it? Not any material evidence on his person, or the testimony of two witnesses who had seen him fire, but simply the fact that he was the only Belgian found in a certain building the inmates of which had been condemned, a priori, as franc-tireurs. The logic of this proceeding is defended by the tradesman interpreter, who submits[280] that “apart from all evidence, the persons brought to trial must have acted somehow in a suspicious manner—otherwise they would never have been brought to trial at all.”

“It is untrue,” nevertheless he states expressly, “that an arbitrary selection among the persons brought forward was made when the order for execution was issued.” But one of the Belgian women[281] held prisoner in the Station Square describes how “the men were placed in rows of five, and the fifth in each row was taken and shot,” as she affirms, “in my presence. If the fifth man happened to be old, his place was taken by the sixth man if he happened to be younger. This was also witnessed by my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, my cousin and our servant....”

“The whole day long,” states another Belgian woman,[282] “I saw civilians being shot—twenty to twenty-five of them, including some monks or priests—in the Station Square and the Boulevard de Tirlemont, opposite the warehouse. The victims were bound four together and placed on the pavement in front of the Maison Hamaide. The soldiers who shot them were on the other side of the Boulevard, on the warehouse roof. For that matter, the soldiers were firing everywhere in all directions.”

The executions were also witnessed by the German troops. “On the morning of August 26th,” states a soldier,[283] “I saw many civilians, more than a hundred, among them five priests, shot at the Station Square in Louvain because they had fired on German troops or because weapons were found on their persons.”

This went on all day, and all day the women were compelled to watch it, while the surviving men were marched away in batches, and the houses on either side of the railway continued to burn. When night came the women were confined in the Station. “My aunt,” continues the witness quoted above,[284] “was taken to the Station with her baby and kept there till the morning. It rained all the night, and she wrapped the baby in her skirt. The baby cried for food, and a German soldier gave the child a little water, and took my aunt and the child to an empty railway-carriage. Some other women got into the carriage with her, but during the whole night the Germans fired at the carriage for amusement....”

The firing by German soldiers had never ceased since the first outbreak at 8.0 o’clock the evening before. An eye-witness records two bursts of it on the 26th—one at 5.0 p.m., and a more serious one at 8.45.[285] This firing was due in part to panic, but was in part of a more deliberate character. “The whole day,” states a Belgian witness,[286] “the soldiers went and came through the streets, saying: ‘Man hat geschossen,’ but it seems that the shots came from the soldiers themselves. I myself saw a soldier going through the streets shooting peacefully in the air.” There was also killing in cold blood. A café proprietor and his daughter were shot by two German soldiers waiting to be served. The other daughter crept under a table and escaped.[287]

The women held prisoner at the Station were only released at 8.0 o’clock on the morning of the 27th,[288] but they had suffered less during these hours than the men. “Of the men,” as a German witness puts it,[289] “some were shot according to Martial Law. In the case of a large number of others it was, however, impossible to determine whether they had taken part in the shooting. These persons were placed for the moment in the Station; some of them were conveyed elsewhere.”

The first batch[290] of those “not found guilty” was “conveyed” by the Boulevard de Diest round the outskirts of the town, and out along the Malines Road, about 11.0 o’clock in the morning. It consisted of from 70 to 80 men, one of whom at least was 75 years old, while five were neutrals—a Paraguayan priest, Father Gamarra,[291] the Superior of the Spanish Hostel, Father Catala, and three of Father Catala’s students. There were doctors, lawyers, and retired officers among the Belgian victims. One prisoner was driven on ahead to warn the country people that all the hostages would be executed if a single shot were fired;[292] the rest were searched, had their hands bound behind their backs, and were marched in column under guard. On the way to Herent they were used as a screen.[293] The village of Herent was burning, and they had to run through the street to avoid being scorched by the flames.[294] “Carbonised corpses were lying in front of the houses.”—“At Herent” states the South American priest,[295] “I saw lying in the nook of a wall the corpse of a girl twelve or thirteen years old, who had been burnt alive.” On the road from Herent to Bueken “everything was devastated.” Beyond Bueken and Campenhout they were made to halt in a field, and were told that they were going to be executed. Squads of soldiers advanced on them from the front and rear, and they were kept many minutes in suspense. Then they were marched on again towards Campenhout, surrounded by a company which, they were given to understand, was the “execution company.” Crowds of German troops, bivouacked by the roadside, shouted at them and spat on them as they passed. They reached Campenhout at dusk, and were locked up for the night in the church with the inhabitants of the village. At 4.30 a.m. they were warned to confess, as their execution was imminent. At 5.0 a.m. they were released from the church, and told they were free. But at Bueken they were arrested again with a large number of country people, and were marched back towards Campenhout. One of these countrywomen bore a baby on the road.[296] From the outskirts of Campenhout they were suddenly ordered to make their own way as best they could to the Belgian lines. They arrived at Malines about 11.30 in the morning (of August 27th), about 200 strong. Within four hours of their arrival the German bombardment[297] of Malines began, and they had to march on again to Antwerp.

A second batch[298] was driven out along the Brussels Road on August 26th between 1.0 and 2.0 o’clock in the afternoon. As they marched through Louvain by the Rue de Bruxelles, the guard fired into the windows of the houses and shot down one of the prisoners, who was panic-stricken and tried to escape.[299] At Herent they were yoked to heavy carts and made to drag them along by-roads for three hours,[299] and another civilian was shot on the way.[299] At 10.0 p.m. they were made to lie down in an open field with their feet tied together, and lay thus in pouring rain till 6.0 o’clock next morning. Then they were marched through Bueken, Thildonck, Wespelaer—still in pouring rain—with their hands bound by a single long cord. They reached Campenhout at noon, and were set to digging trenches. At 7.0 p.m. they were allowed to sit down and rest, but only just behind the batteries bombarding the Antwerp forts,[300] which might have opened retaliation fire on them at any moment. That night they passed in Campenhout church, and at 9.0 o’clock next morning (August 28th) they were marched back again to Louvain, about 1,000 in all—women and children as well as men. “The houses along the road were burning. The principal streets of Louvain itself were burnt out.”[300] That night at Louvain they were crowded into the Cavalry Riding School in the Rue du Manège. Six or seven thousand people were imprisoned there in all.[301] The press was terrible, and the heat from the burning buildings round was so great that the glass of the roof cracked during the night.[301] Two women went out of their minds and two babies died.[302] Next morning a German officer read them a proclamation to the effect that their liberty was given them because Germany had already won the war,[303] and they were marched out again through the streets. They passed corpses left unburied since the night of August 25th.[303] “The German soldiers giggled at the sight.”[304] Once more they were driven round the countryside. At Herent the women and children, and the men over forty, were set free. At Campenhout the curé was added to the company, after being dragged round his parish at the tail of a cart.[305] At Boortmeerbeek the men between twenty and forty were also released at last, and told to go forward to the Belgian lines, under threat of being shot if they turned back. They arrived in front of Fort Waelhem in the dark, at 11.0 p.m. on the 29th, and were fired on by the Belgian outposts; but they managed to make themselves known and came through to safety.

The third batch “conveyed elsewhere” from Louvain on August 26th consisted of the Garde Civique.[306] All members of this body were summoned by proclamation to present themselves at the Hôtel-de-Ville at 2.0 p.m.[307] The 95 men who reported themselves were informed that they were prisoners, taken to the Station, and entrained in two goods-vans. There were 250 other deportees on the train, including the Gardes Civiques of Beyghem and Grimberghen, and about a hundred women and children. They did not reach the internment camp at Münster till the night of the 28th, and on the journey they were almost starved. At Cologne Station a German Red Cross worker refused one of the women, who asked her in German for a little milk to feed her sick baby fourteen months old.[308] In the camp at Münster all the men were crowded promiscuously into a single wooden shed. The floor was strewn with straw (already old), which was never changed. The blankets (also old, and too thin to keep out the cold) were never disinfected or washed. There was no lighting or heating. The food was insufficient and disgusting. The sanitary arrangements were indecent. And the deportees had to live under these conditions for months, in the clothes they stood in, though many had come in slippers and shirt-sleeves—the proclamation having taken them completely by surprise. In neighbouring huts there were the 400 Russian students from Liége, 600 or 700 people from Visé, the Gardes Civiques of Hasselt and Tongres, people from Haccourt and from several communes in the Province of Limburg—about 1,700 prisoners in all. On October 4th an article in the Berliner Tageblatt, signed by a German general, admitted that “only two of the prisoners at Münster were under suspicion of having fired”; but none of the prisoners from Louvain were released till October 30th, and then only cripples and men over seventy years of age. The rest were retained, including a man with a wooden leg....

The fourth batch of prisoners on August 26th started about 3.0 o’clock in the afternoon, also by way of the Boulevard de Diest and the Malines Road.[309] This group seems to have been treated even more brutally than the rest. One man was so violently mishandled that he fainted, and was carried in a waggon the first part of the way. He came to himself in time to see his own house burning and his wife waving him farewell. He was then thrown out of the waggon and made to go on foot. His bonds cut so deeply into his flesh that his arms lost all sensation for three days. The party was marched aimlessly about between Herent, Louvain, Bueken, and Herent again till 11.0 at night, when they had to camp in the open in the rain. They were refused water to drink. At 3.0 a.m. on August 27th they were driven on again, and marched till 3.0 p.m., when they arrived at Rotselaer. At Rotselaer they were shut up in the church—a company of 3,000 men and women, including all the inhabitants of the village. This respite only lasted an hour, and at 4.0 o’clock they started once more along the Louvain Road. They were destined for a still worse torment, which will shortly be described.

These preliminary expulsions on the 26th were followed up by more comprehensive measures on the morning of the 27th. Between 8.0 and 9.0 a.m. German soldiers went round the streets proclaiming from door to door: “Louvain is to be bombarded at noon; everyone is to leave the town immediately.”[310] The people had no time to set their affairs in order or to prepare for the journey. They started out just as they were, fearing that the bombardment would overtake them before they could escape from the town. The exodus was complete. About 40,000 people altogether were in flight,[311] and the majority of them streamed towards the Station Square, where they had been ordered to assemble, and then out by the Boulevard de Tirlemont, along the Tirlemont Road.

The Dominicans from the Monastery in the Rue Juste-Lipse were expelled with the rest. “At the moment when they were leaving the Monastery an old man was brought in seriously wounded in the stomach; it was evident that he had but a few hours to live. A German officer proposed to ‘finish him off,’ but was deterred by the Prior. One of the monks attempted to pick up a paralysed person who had fallen in the street; the soldiers prevented him, striking him with the butt-ends of their muskets. The weeping, terrified population was hurrying towards the Railway Station....”[312] At the Station the Dominicans were stopped and sent to Germany by train; the rest of the crowd was driven on. There were from 8,000 to 10,000 people in this first column.[313] “Nothing but heads was to be seen—a sea of heads.... The wind was blowing violently, and a remorseless rain scourged us.... The crowd was pressing upon us, suffocating us, and sometimes literally lifting us along like a wave, our feet not touching the ground. We progressed with difficulty, and had to stop every ten metres. Sometimes a German asked us if we had any arms....”[314] When they arrived at Tirlemont they were kept outside the town till nightfall.[315] The inhabitants did their best for them, but Tirlemont, too, had been ravaged by the invasion. The number of the refugees was overwhelming, and there was a dearth of supplies. “My mother and I,” states a Professor of Louvain University,[316] “had to walk about 20 miles on the 27th and the following day before we could find a peasant cart. We had to carry the few belongings we were able to take away, and to walk in the heavy rain. We could find nothing to eat, but other people were yet more unfortunate than we. I saw ladies walking in the same plight, without hats and almost in their night-dresses. Sick persons, too, dragged themselves along or were carried in wheel-barrows. Thousands of people were obliged to sleep in Tirlemont on the church pavements. We found a little room to sleep in....”

Ecclesiastics were singled out for special maltreatment. This professor, and twelve other priests or monks with him, was stopped by German troops encamped at Lovenjoul. They were informed that they were going to be shot for “having incited the population.”—“A soldier,” states the professor, “called me ‘Black Devil’ and pushed me roughly into a dirty little stable.”—“I was thrust into a pig-stye,” states one of his fellow-victims,[317] “from which a pig had just been removed before my eyes.... There I was compelled to undress completely. German soldiers searched my clothes and took all I had. Thereupon the other ecclesiastics were brought to the stye; two of them were stripped like me; all were searched and robbed of all they had. The soldiers kept everything of value—watches, money and so on—and only returned us trifles. Our breviaries were thrown into the manure. Some of the ecclesiastics were robbed of large sums—one had 6,000 francs on him, another more than 4,000. All were brutally handled and received blows.” They were saved from death by the professor’s mother, who appealed to a German officer with more sense of justice than his colleagues, and they were thankful to rejoin the other refugees.

A second stream of refugees was pouring out of Louvain by the Tervueren Road,[318] towards the south-west. “On the road,” states a professor,[319] “we had to raise our arms each time we met soldiers. An officer in a motor-car levelled his revolver at us. He threatened fiercely a young man walking by himself who only raised one arm—he was carrying a portmanteau in the other hand, which he had to put down in a hurry. At Tervueren we were searched several times over, and then took the electric tram for Brussels....”

But here the ecclesiastics were singled out once more. One was searched so roughly that his cassock was torn from top to bottom.[320] Another was charged with carrying “cartridges,” which turned out to be a packet of chocolates.[321] One soldier tried to slip a cartridge into a Jesuit’s pocket, but the trick was fortunately seen by another monk standing by.[322] Insults were hurled at them—“Swine”; “Beastly Papists”; “You incite the people to fire on us”; “You will be castrated, you swine!” Then they were driven into a field, and surrounded by a guard with loaded rifles. About 140 ecclesiastics were collected altogether,[323] including Mgr. Ladeuze, the Rector of Louvain University; Canon Cauchie, the Professor of History; Mgr. Becker, the Principal of the American Seminary; and Mgr. Willemsen, formerly President of the American College. After they had waited an hour, 26 of them were taken and lined up against a fence. Expecting to be shot, they gave one another absolution, but after waiting seven or eight minutes they were marched out of the field and lined up once more with their backs to a wood. As they marched, a soldier muttered that “one of them was going to be shot.” The two Americans showed their passports to an officer, but were violently rebuffed. Then Father Dupierreux, a Jesuit student 23 years old, was led before them under guard, and one of their number was called forward to translate aloud into German a paper that had been found on Father Dupierreux’s person. The paper (it was a manuscript memorandum of half-a-dozen lines) compared the conduct of the Germans at Louvain to the conduct of Genseric and of the Saracens, and the burning of the Library to the burning of the Library at Alexandria. The officer cut the recitation short. Father Dupierreux received absolution, and was then ordered to advance towards the wood. Four soldiers were lined up in front of him, and the 26 prisoners were ordered to face about, in order to witness the execution. Among their number was Father Robert Dupierreux, the twin brother of the condemned.[324] “Father Dupierreux,” states Father Schill,[325] the Jesuit who had been forced to translate the document, “had listened to the reading with complete calm.... He kept his eyes fixed on the crucifix.... The command rang out: ‘Aim! Fire!’ We only heard one report. The Father fell on his back; a last shudder ran through his limbs. Then the spectators were ordered to turn about again, while the officer bent over the body and discharged his pistol into the ear. The bullet came out through the eye.”

The others were then placed in carts, and harangued:[326] “When we pass through a village, if a single shot is fired from any house, the whole village will be burnt. You will be shot and the inhabitants likewise.” They were paraded in these carts through the streets of Brussels and liberated, at 7.0 o’clock in the evening, at eight kilometres’ distance beyond the city.

Meanwhile, the proclamation of the morning had had its effect. Louvain was cleared of its inhabitants, but the bombardment did not follow. Between 11.0 and 12.0 o’clock a few cannon shots were heard in the distance, but that was all.[327] “At Rotselaer,” states an inhabitant of Louvain who was in the party conveyed there on the 27th,[328] “I understood from the prisoners in the church that all the people of Rotselaer were made to leave their houses on the pretext that they were in danger of bombardment, and the Germans stated that they were being placed in the church for security. While all these people were in the church the Germans robbed the houses and then burned the village.” At Louvain the German strategy was the same. The bombardment was only a pretext for the wholesale expulsion of the inhabitants, which was followed by systematic pillage and incendiarism as soon as the ground was clear. The conflagration of two nights before, which had never burnt itself out, was extended deliberately and revived where it was dying out; the plundering, which had been desultory since the Germans first occupied the town, was now conducted under the supervision of officers from house to house.[329]

On the morning of August 27th, even before the exodus began, a Dutch witness[330] waiting at the Hôtel-de-Ville saw “soldiers streaming in from all sides, laden with huge packages of stolen property—clothes, boxes of cigars, bottles of wine, etc. Many of these men were drunk.”—“I saw the German soldiers taking the wine away from my house and from neighbours’ houses,” states a Belgian witness.[331] “They got into the cellar with a ladder, and brought out the wine and placed it on their waggons.”—“The streets were full of empty wine bottles,” states another.[332] “My factory has been completely plundered,” states a cigar-manufacturer.[333] “Seven million cigars have disappeared.” The factory itself was set on fire on the 26th, and was only saved by the Germans for fear the flames might spread to the prison. They saved it by an extinguishing apparatus which was as instantaneous in its effect as the apparatus they used for setting houses alight. “The soldiers, led by a non-commissioned officer, went from house to house and broke in the shop fronts and house doors with their rifle butts. A cart or waggon waited for them in the street to carry away the loot.”[334] Carts were also employed in the suburb of Blauwput, on the other side of the railway. “I saw German soldiers break into the houses,” states a witness from Blauwput.[335] “One party consisting of six soldiers had a little cart with them. I saw these break into a store where there were many bottles of champagne and a stock of cigars, etc. They drank a good deal of wine, smoked cigars, and carried off a supply in the cart. I saw many Germans engaged in looting.” This employment of carts became an anxiety to the Higher Command. A type-written order, addressed to the Officers of the 53rd Landwehr Infantry, lays down that “For the future it is forbidden to use army carts for the transport of things which have nothing whatever to do with the service of the Army. At some period these carts, which travel empty with our Army, will be required for the transport of war material. They are now actually loaded with all sorts of things, none of which have anything to do with military supplies or equipment.”[336]

This systematic pillage went on day after day. “The Station Square,” states a refugee from Louvain[337] who traversed the city again on August 29th, “was transformed into a vast goods-depôt, where bottles of wine were the most prominent feature. Officers and men were eating and drinking in the middle of the ruins, without appearing to be in the least incommoded by the appalling stench of the corpses which still lay in the Boulevard. Along the Boulevard de Diest I saw Landsturm soldiers taking from the houses anything that suited their fancy, and then setting the house alight, and this under their officers’ eyes.” On September 2nd there was a fresh outbreak of plunder and arson in the Rue Léopold and the Rue Marie-Thérèse.[338] As late as September 5th—ten days after the original catastrophe—the Germans were pillaging houses in the Rue de la Station and loading the loot on carts.[339] Householders who returned when all was over found the destruction complete. “I found my parents’ house sacked,” states one.[340] “A great deal of the furniture was smashed, the contents of cupboards and drawers were scattered about the rooms.... In my sister’s house the looking-glasses on the ground floor were broken. On the bedding of the glass the imprint of the rifle-butts was clearly visible.”—“Inside our house,” states another,[341] “everything is upside down.... The floors are strewn with flowers and with silver plate not belonging to our house, the writing room is filled with buckets and basins, in which they had cooled the bottles of champagne.... There was straw everywhere—in short, the place was like a barn. To crown everything, my father was not allowed to sleep in his own house.... When the Germans at last quitted our residence, it was necessary to cleanse and disinfect everything. The lowest stable was cleaner than our bedrooms, where scraps from the gourmandising and pieces of meat lay rotting in every corner amid half-smoked cigars, candle ends, broken plates, and hay brought from I don’t know where.”

But these two houses were, at any rate, not burnt down, and more frequently, when they had finished with a house, the Germans set it on fire. They had begun on the night of August 25th; on August 26th they were proceeding systematically,[342] and the work continued on the 27th and the following days. All varieties of incendiary apparatus were employed—a white powder,[343] an inflammable stick,[344] a projectile fired from a rifle.[345] They introduced these into the house to be burnt by staving in a panel of the front door[346] or breaking a window,[347] and the conflagration was immediate when once the apparatus was inside. This scientific incendiarism was the regular sequel to the organised pillage. The firing by German soldiers also went on. “On August 27th,” states one German witness,[348] “I was fired at from a garden from behind the hedge, without being hit. It was in the afternoon; I could not see the person who had shot.” The identification can be inferred from the experience of the Rector of Louvain University, Mgr. Ladeuze, on the night of August 25th, when he detected two German soldiers firing over the garden wall of the Chemical Institute into the Rue de Namur.[349] Another German witness, a military surgeon in the Neuss Landsturm,[350] who arrived at Louvain in the afternoon of August 27th, testifies that “in the course of the afternoon I heard the noise of firing in the Rue de la Station.... I had the impression that we were being shot at from a house there, in spite of my conspicuous armlet with the Red Cross. We approached the house. A German soldier of another battalion leapt out from the first floor, and in so doing broke the upper part of his thigh. He told me that he had just been pursued and shot at by six civilians in the house.” The surgeon, a young man of twenty-five, a new-comer to Louvain, and unused to the notion of German soldiers firing on one another, repeats this story without seeing that it fails to explain the shots fired from the house and directed against himself, and he takes the presence of the “six civilians” on faith. Was the soldier who escaped punishment by this lie firing into the street from panic? This may have been so, for the German troops were in a state of nervous degeneration, but there is another possible explanation. Two days later, on August 29th, when Mr. Gibson, Secretary of the American Legation at Brussels, visited Louvain to enquire into the catastrophe, his motor-car was fired at in the Rue de la Station from a house, and five or six armed men in civilian costume were dragged out of it by his escort and marched off for execution. But they were not executed, for they were German soldiers disguised to give Mr. Gibson an ocular demonstration that “the civilians had fired.” The German Higher Command had already adopted this as their official thesis, and they were determined to impose it on the world.[351]

After the exodus on the morning of the 27th, Louvain lay empty of inhabitants all day, while the burning and plundering went on. But at dusk a procession of civilians, driven by soldiers, streamed in from the north. They were the fourth batch of prisoners who had been marched out of Louvain on the previous day. They had spent the night in the open, and had been locked up that afternoon in Rotselaer church. But after only an hour’s respite they had been driven forth again, and the whole population of Rotselaer with them, along the road leading back to the city.

“On the way,” states one of the victims,[352] “we rested a moment. The curé of Rotselaer, a man 86 years of age, spoke to the officer in command: ‘Herr Offizier, what you are doing now is a cowardly act. My people did no harm, and, if you want a victim, kill me....’ The German soldiers then seized the curé by the neck and took him away. Some Germans picked up mud from the ground and threw it in his face....”

“We entered Louvain,” states the curé himself,[353] “by the Canal and the Rue du Canal. No ruins. We reached the Grand’ Place—what a spectacle! The Church of Saint-Pierre! Rest in front of the Hôtel-de-Ville. Fatigue compelled me to stretch myself on the pavement, while the houses blazed all the time.

“Other prisoners from Louvain and the neighbourhood kept arriving. Soon I saw fresh prisoners arrive from Rotselaer—women, children and old men, among others a blind old man of eighty years, and the wife of the doctor at Rotselaer, dragged from her sick-bed. (She died during the journey to Germany.)...”

“In the Grand’ Place,” states the former witness,[354] “the heat from the burning houses was so great that the prisoners huddled together to get away from it....”

“After we had remained standing there about an hour,” states a third,[355] “we had to proceed towards the Station along the Rue de la Station. In this same road we saw the German soldiers plundering the houses. They took pleasure in letting us see them doing it. In the city and at Kessel-Loo the conflagration redoubled in intensity.”

“The houses were all burning in the Rue de la Station,” states the first,[356] “and there were even flames in the street which we had to jump across. We were closely guarded by German soldiers, who threatened to kill us if we looked from side to side.”

Yet these victims in their misery were accused of shooting by their tormentors. “On August 27th,” states an officer concerned,[357] “the Third Battalion of the Landwehr Infantry Regiment No. 53 had to take with it on its march from Rotselaer to Louvain a convoy of about 1,000 civilian prisoners.... Among the prisoners were a number of Belgian priests, one of whom,[358] especially caught my attention because at every halt he went from one to another of the prisoners and addressed words to them in an excited manner, so that I had to keep him under special observation. In Louvain we made over the prisoners at the Station.... On the following morning it was reported to me ... that the above-mentioned priest had shot at one of the men of the guard, but had failed to hit him, and in consequence had himself been shot in the Station Square.”

Such were the rumours that passed current in the German Army; but there is no reference in this officer’s deposition to what really happened at the Station on the night of the 27th-28th. The prisoners arrived there about 7.0 p.m., and were immediately put on board a train. Their numbers had risen by now to between 2,000 and 3,000,[359] and the overcrowding was appalling. The curé of Rotselaer was placed in a truck which had carried troops and was furnished with benches; but even this truck was made to hold 50 people,[360] while the majority were forced into cattle trucks—from 70 to 100 men, women, and children in each,[361] which had never been cleaned, and were knee-deep in dung.[362] They stood in these trucks all night, while the train remained standing in the Station. On August 28th, about 6.0 in the morning, they started for Cologne, but the stoppages and shuntings were interminable, and Cologne was not reached till the afternoon of August 31st. During these four days—from the evening of August 27th to the afternoon of August 31st—the prisoners were given nothing to eat,[363] and were not allowed to get out of the train to relieve themselves when it stopped.[364] “We had nothing to eat,” states one of them,[365] “not even the child one month old.”—“My wife was suckling her child,” states another,[366] “but her milk came to an end. My wife was crying nearly all the time. The baby was dreadfully ill, and nearly died.”—“We had been without food for two days and nights, and had nothing to drink till we got to Cologne, except that one of my fellow-prisoners had a bottle of water, from which we just wetted our lips.”[367]—“I asked for some water for my child at Aix-la-Chapelle, and it was refused. It was the soldiers that I asked, and they spat at me when they refused the water. The soldiers also took all the money that I had upon me.”[368]—“We had not been allowed to leave the train to obey the calls of nature, till at Cologne we went on our knees and begged the soldiers to allow us to get down.”[369]