But these two houses were, at any rate, not burnt down, and more frequently, when they had finished with a house, the Germans set it on fire. They had begun on the night of August 25th; on August 26th they were proceeding systematically,[342] and the work continued on the 27th and the following days. All varieties of incendiary apparatus were employed--a white powder,[343] an inflammable stick,[344] a projectile fired from a rifle.[345] They introduced these into the house to be burnt by staving in a panel of the front door[346] or breaking a window,[347] and the conflagration was immediate when once the apparatus was inside. This scientific incendiarism was the regular sequel to the organised pillage. The firing by German soldiers also went on. “On August 27th,” states one German witness,[348] “I was fired at from a garden from behind the hedge, without being hit. It was in the afternoon; I could not see the person who had shot.” The identification can be inferred from the experience of the Rector of Louvain University, Mgr. Ladeuze, on the night of August 25th, when he detected two German soldiers firing over the garden wall of the _Chemical Institute_ into the _Rue de Namur_.[349] Another German witness, a military surgeon in the Neuss Landsturm,[350] who arrived at Louvain in the afternoon of August 27th, testifies that “in the course of the afternoon I heard the noise of firing in the _Rue de la Station_.... I had the impression that we were being shot at from a house there, in spite of my conspicuous armlet with the Red Cross. We approached the house. A German soldier of another battalion leapt out from the first floor, and in so doing broke the upper part of his thigh. He told me that he had just been pursued and shot at by six civilians in the house.” The surgeon, a young man of twenty-five, a new-comer to Louvain, and unused to the notion of German soldiers firing on one another, repeats this story without seeing that it fails to explain the shots fired _from_ the house and directed against himself, and he takes the presence of the “six civilians” on faith. Was the soldier who escaped punishment by this lie firing into the street from panic? This may have been so, for the German troops were in a state of nervous degeneration, but there is another possible explanation. Two days later, on August 29th, when Mr. Gibson, Secretary of the American Legation at Brussels, visited Louvain to enquire into the catastrophe, his motor-car was fired at in the _Rue de la Station_ from a house, and five or six armed men in civilian costume were dragged out of it by his escort and marched off for execution. But they were not executed, for they were German soldiers disguised to give Mr. Gibson an ocular demonstration that “the civilians had fired.” The German Higher Command had already adopted this as their official thesis, and they were determined to impose it on the world.[351]