“A chain of baseless fabrications” is the phrase used by Germany to characterize the charges brought against the German armies by the French government, claiming that “German army officers have, by every means and with full success, effected the maintenance of discipline and the strict observance of all the rules of war in each and all the spheres of operation.” The demolished villages and pitiful victims must tell their own tale of terror. Doubtless many of the crimes committed have been without the sanction of the German government or even without the authority of a superior officer, but, even allowing for the partisanship that is natural on the part of afflicted inhabitants, the testimony of the French commission together with that of former Ambassador Bryce must deeply affect the attitude of all thinking people toward warfare. CHAPTER XV DESTROYING THE PRICELESS MONUMENTS OF CIVILIZATION THE INEXPIABLE GERMAN CRIME, LOUVAIN -- ART TREASURES OF HISTORIC CITY -- REDUCED TO A HEAP OF ASHES -- PITILESS DESTRUCTION AS TOLD BY TOWN TREASURER -- A MODERN POMPEII -- BURNING OF CITY SYSTEMATIC -- INDIGNANT PROTEST AGAINST MODERN HUNS. All through Belgium and all through the country of the Franco-German border line are towns and cities filled with treasures of art and history--some of the richest, indeed, that centuries of civilization have amassed. Under the guns of both sides of the mighty conflict these paintings and shrines and storied buildings have been exposed to destruction, and many of them have been wantonly sacrificed, shattered beyond hope of restoration. Under the latest Hague proposals, Article XXVIII, historic monuments are supposed to be respected even by warring nations, yet both Germany and France have accused each other of violating this convention. The whole of civilized humanity rises in protest against such sacrilege. Among all the black crimes of the German invasion of Belgium none is blacker than the sack and burning of Louvain, the fairest city of Belgium and the intellectual metropolis of the Low Countries. According to a bitter statement of Frank Jewett Mather, the well-known American art critic, “Louvain contained more beautiful works of art than the Prussian nation has produced in its entire history.” ART TREASURES OF HISTORIC CITY There was hardly a building within the ramparts but breathed the air of some romance of the Middle Ages or marked a stepping-stone in its stirring history. Once before war robbed it of its commercial prestige, only to permit it to rise, phœnix-like, as the center of learning during the sixteenth century. At the opening of the present war it still boasted of the largest university in Belgium, in which thousands of antique volumes and prints were stored. Its museums and its churches housed scores of paintings of the old Flemish masters.