When the Belgians took Malines again, on the 25th August, the Germans began to bombard it. This act can only be put down to a thirst for vengeance. They made violent efforts to demolish it quarter by quarter by bursting shells. One shell struck a bakehouse and killed two workmen in it. The cathedral, the museum, the town hall, St. Peter’s Church, the magistrates’ court, and all the buildings round about the “Grand Place” were badly damaged, and the ministers of State of the Triple Entente, who visited Malines on the 13th September, saw shells smashing in before their eyes the pro-cathedral of Saint-Rombaud, full of miracles of art, where Van Dyck’s “Christ upon the Cross” towered high above the tombs of the archbishops; they witnessed also the destruction of the famous old carillon of the pro-cathedral, and the belfries of churches, convents and seminaries buried beneath the ruins (_vide_ the photograph of one of the chapels of “Our Lady of Malines” after the Germans had passed by, in _L’Illustration_ for the 3rd October). What is left of Malines? A German journalist, war-correspondent of the _Berliner Tageblatt_, undertook to reply to this question, in a description, entitled _Malines the Dead_, of the town in the condition in which the German bombardment left it. “Life has become extinct. The town is dead. The sixty thousand inhabitants have fled. The melancholy houses stand open. The streets are empty. German soldiers go up and down. In the Grand Place, the wool-market, the Place d’Egmont, at the railway station, soldiers are working in larger groups, but the ordinary residents are wanting. “The emptiness and the havoc in these venerable-looking streets are so awful and so overwhelming that one’s breath is stopped and one recalls with terror the legend of towns that bore a curse upon them. What no one has ever seen, what Hoffmann and Edgar Poe have never dreamed of in their morbid visions, has here become a reality. “In the midst of the town rises the cathedral, a Gothic building of gigantic size. The tower, 100 metres high, bounds the horizon on the west. At the top, at a height which makes the brain reel, four dials, fourteen metres in diameter, are twisted and riddled with bullets. Shells have hollowed out seven holes in the wall.” Lierre, a town of 26,000 inhabitants, was, like Malines, pitilessly bombarded towards the end of September. When the cannonade began the inhabitants concealed themselves in cellars, but shortly afterwards they fled. Several among them took refuge in Antwerp. Many houses in the town were destroyed and a certain number of people were wounded. A shell even struck a hospital and killed nine persons. BOMBARDMENT OF MARS-LA-TOUR