From the invaders’ point of view, therefore, it was essential both to restrict the operations of the Belgian forces and to affirm their own grip on Brussels. And this explains why the threats indulged in to bombard and burn Brussels were merely threats. In a city of 800,000 people, numbers of whom, doubtless, secretly possessed arms, a rising on the part of the population, with a native army of nearly 100,000 men only a few miles away, meant a risk of the garrison of Brussels and even of the occupying troops altogether having to defend themselves against extermination, for the hatred they had inspired was unspeakable. The plan resolved upon, it was carried out without mercy. Owing to its ancient renown, and the world-wide interest of its buildings and monuments, the destruction of Louvain has most shocked civilised peoples. The loss is a loss to the world, but as regards its utter inhumanity, the razing of the other towns, not to speak of the villages surrounding them, was equally pitiless and savage. In these murders the German soldiery spared neither age nor sex, and wreaked upon the most helpless their most indescribable and debased barbarities. It has been said that for every Belgian soldier killed in action, they slew three unarmed men, women, or children. In the devastated districts the bodies of murdered peasants lay unburied in ditches by the roadside. The corpses of children, stiff in death, clung in their last attitude of terror to the corpses of their mutilated mothers. Others lay amid the roofless ruins of their homes. There were instances in which women were stripped, outraged by brutal soldiery, hanged from the branches of trees, and disembowelled in mockery of their final agony. Those who could escaped into the woods, where they hid without food or shelter. Numbers died of starvation and exposure. To destroy the last chance of life for these fugitives, and to avoid the trouble of hunting them out, corpses of murdered people were thrown into wells in order to poison the water.[D] As might be expected, troops capable of such enormities were, as combatants, of little value. Well disciplined soldiers could not be driven to such excesses. Though their greater numbers, when reinforced, enabled the invaders to make headway against the native troops, yet in every encounter between anything like equal forces they were always decisively defeated, and without exception suffered losses out of all proportion to those they were able to inflict.