Alighting at the station at Aerschot, I looked about me, scarcely believing that what I saw was real. The railway station appeared to have fallen victim to an earthquake. CHAPTER V AERSCHOT I think until that day I had always cherished a lurking hope that the Huns were not as black as they were painted. I had been used to think of the German race, as tinged with a certain golden glamour, because to it belonged the man who wrote the Fifth Symphony; the man who wrote the divine first part of "Faust," and still more that other, whose mocking but sublime laughter would be a fitting accompaniment of the horrors at Aerschot. Oh, Beethoven, Goethe, Heine! Not even out of respect for your undying genius can I hide the truth about the Germans any longer. What I have seen, I must believe! In the pouring rain, wearing a Belgian officer's great-coat, I trudged along through a city that might well have been Pompeii or Herculaneum; it was a city that existed no longer; it was absolutely _the shell of a town_. The long streets were full of hollow, blackened skeletons of what had once been houses--street upon street of them, and street upon street. The brain reeled before the spectacle. And each of those houses once a home. A place of thought, of rest, of happiness, of work, of love. All the inhabitants have fled, leaving their lares and penates just as the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum sought to flee when the lava came down on them. Here a wall stands, there a pillar and a few bricks. But between the ruins, strange, touching, unbelievable, gleaming from the background, are the scarlet and white of dahlias and roses in the gardens behind, that have somehow miraculously escaped the ruin that has fallen on the solid walls and ceilings and floors so carefully constructed by the brain of man, and so easily ruined by man's brutality. It is as though the flowers had some miraculous power of self-preservation, some secret unknown to bricks and mortar, some strange magic, that keeps the sweet blossoms laughing and defiant under the Hun's shell-fire. And the red and the pure white of them, and the green, intensify, with a tremendous potency, the black horrors of the town! In every street I observed always the same thing; hundreds of empty bottles. "Toujours _les bouteilles_," one of my companions kept saying--a brilliant young Brussels lawyer who was now in this regiment. The other officer was also a _Bruxellois_, and I was told afterwards that these two had formerly been the "Nuts" of Brussels, the two smartest young men of the town. To see them that day gave little idea of their smartness; they both were black with grime and smoke, with beards that had no right to be there, creeping over their faces, boots caked with mud to the knees, and a general air of having seen activities at very close quarters. They took me to the church, and there the little old brown-faced sacristan joined us, punctuating our way with groans and sobs of horror.