THE BURNING OF LOUVAIN

By Richard Harding Davis.

A SHUDDER ran through the civilized world when the news came that the Germans had put the torch to the historic Belgian city of Louvain, with its priceless treasures of architecture and learning. It had been occupied by the German soldiery on August 19, and a week later was in smoking ruins. As a veteran war correspondent, who had reported every war since the 1897 conflict between Greece and Turkey, Davis was in Louvain and witnessed the scenes here described in a news dispatch. It was later incorporated in a volume, "With the Allies," copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Shortly after penning this vivid picture of Teutonic "frightfulness," Davis was captured by the Germans and narrowly escaped being shot as a spy. A high type of American journalism is exhibited in his war correspondence, concluding with his report of the withdrawal of the Franco-British forces from Serbia.

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 also said 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 Hotel de Ville," he added, "was a beautiful building; it is a pity it must be destroyed."

Were he telling us his soldiers had destroyed a kitchen-garden, his tone could not have expressed less regret.

Ten days before I had been in Louvain, when it was occupied by Belgian troops and King Albert and his staff. The city dates from the eleventh century, and the population was forty-two thousand. The citizens were brewers, lace-makers and manufacturers of ornaments for churches. The university once was the most celebrated in European cities and was the headquarters of the Jesuits.

In the Louvain College many priests now in America have been educated, and ten days before, over the great yellow walls of the college, I had seen hanging two American flags. I had found the city clean, sleepy and pretty, with narrow twisting streets and smart shops and cafes. Set in flower gardens were the houses, with red roofs, green shutters and white walls.

Over those that faced south had been trained pear-trees, their branches heavy with fruit, spread out against the walls like branches of candelabra. The town hall was an example of Gothic architecture in detail and design more celebrated even than the town hall of Bruges or Brussels. It was five hundred years old and lately had been repaired with taste and at great cost.

Opposite was the church of St. Pierre, dating from the fifteenth century, a very noble building, with many chapels filled with carvings of the time of the Renaissance in wood, stone and iron. In the university were one hundred and fifty thousand volumes.

On the night of the 27th these buildings were empty, exploded cartridges. Statues, pictures, carvings, parchments, archives all these were gone.

No one defends the sniper. But because ignorant Mexicans, when their city was invaded, fired upon our sailors, we did not destroy Vera Cruz. Even had we bombarded Vera Cruz, money could have restored that city. Money can never restore Louvain. Great architects and artists, dead these six hundred years, made it beautiful, and their handiwork belonged to the world. With torch and dynamite the Germans turned those masterpieces into ashes, and all the Kaiser's horses and all his men cannot bring them back again.

When our troop train reached Louvain, the entire heart of the city was destroyed, and the fire had reached the Boulevard Tirlemont, which faces the railroad station. The night was windless, and the sparks rose in steady, leisurely pillars, falling back into the furnace from which they sprang. In their work the soldiers were moving from the heart of the city to the outskirts, street by street, from house to house.

In each building they began at the first floor and, when that was burning steadily, passed to the one next. There were no exceptions whether it was a store, chapel, or private residence, it was destroyed. The occupants had been warned to go, and in each deserted shop or house the furniture was piled, the torch was stuck under it, and into the air went the savings of years, souvenirs of children, of parents, heirlooms that had passed from generation to generation.

The people had time only to fill a pillow case and fly. Some were not so fortunate, and by thousands, like flocks of sheep, they were rounded up and marched through the night to concentration camps. We were not allowed to speak to any citizen of Louvain, but the Germans crowded the windows of the train, boastful, gloating, eager to interpret.

In the two hours during which the train circled the burning city war was before us in its most hateful aspect.

In other wars I have watched men on one hilltop, without haste, without heat, fire at men on another hill, and in consequence on both sides good men were wasted. But in those fights there were no women or children, and the shells struck only vacant stretches of veldt or uninhabited mountain sides.

At Louvain it was war upon the defenseless, war upon churches, colleges, shops of milliners and lace-makers; war brought to the bedside and the fireside; against women harvesting in the fields, against children in wooden shoes at play in the streets.

At Louvain that night the Germans were like men after an orgy.

There were fifty English prisoners, erect and soldierly. In the ocean of gray the little patch of khaki looked pitifully lonely, but they regarded the men who had outnumbered but not defeated them with calm uncurious eyes. In one way I was glad to see them there. Later they will bear witness. They will tell how the enemy makes a wilderness and calls it war.

Outside the station in the public square the people of Louvain passed in an unending procession, women bareheaded, weeping, men carrying the children asleep on their shoulders, all hemmed in by the shadowy army of gray wolves. Once they were halted, and among them were marched a line of men. These were on their way to be shot. And, better to point the moral, an officer halted both processions, and, climbing to a cart, explained why the men were to die. He warned others not to bring down upon themselves a like vengeance.

As those being led to spend the night in the fields looked across to those marked for death they saw old friends, neighbors of long standing, men of their own household. The officers bellowing at them from the cart was illuminated by the headlights of an automobile. He looked like an actor in a spotlight on a darkened stage.

It was all like a scene upon the stage, unreal, inhuman. You felt it could not be true. You felt that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop, that the reports of rifles from the dark ruins came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children.

You felt it as only a nightmare, cruel and uncivilized. And then you remembered that the German Emperor has told us what it is. It is his Holy War.