I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk café where we sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation--August twenty-first, I think, was the date--and watched the sun go out in eclipse like a copper disk. We did not know it then, but it was Louvain's bloody eclipse we saw presaged that day in the suddenly darkened heavens. Even the lines of the sidewalks were lost. The road was piled high with broken, fire-smudged masonry. The building behind was a building no longer. It was a husk of a house, open to the sky, backless and frontless, and fit only to tumble down in the next high wind. As we stood before the empty railroad station, in what I veritably believe to be the forlornest spot there is on this earth, a woman in a shawl came whining to sell us postal cards, on which were views of the desolation that was all about us. "Please buy some pictures," she said in French. "My husband is dead." "When did he die?" one of us asked. She blinked, as though trying to remember. "That night," she said as though there had never been but one night. "They killed him then--that night." "Who killed him?" "They did." She pointed in the direction of the square fronting the station. There were German soldiers where she pointed--both living ones and dead ones. The dead ones, eighty-odd of them, were buried in two big crosswise trenches, in a circular plot that had once been a bed of ornamental flowers surrounding the monument of some local notable. The living ones were standing sentry duty at the fence that flanked the railroad tracks beyond. "They did," she said; "they killed him! Will you buy some postal cards, m'sieur? All the best pictures of the ruins!" She said it flatly, without color in her voice, or feeling or emotion. She did not, I am sure, flinch mentally as she looked at the Germans. Certainly she did not flinch visibly. She was past flinching, I suppose. The officer in command of the force holding the town came, just before we started, to warn us to beware of bicyclists who might be encountered near Tirlemont. "They are all _franc-tireurs_--those Belgians on wheels," he said. "Some of them are straggling soldiers, wearing uniforms under their other clothes. They will shoot at you and trust to their bicycles to get away. We've caught and killed some of them, but there are still a few abroad. Take no chances with them. If I were in your place I should be ready to shoot first." We asked him how the surviving populace of Louvain was behaving. "Oh, we have them--like that!" he said with a laugh, and clenched his hand up in a knot of knuckles to show what he meant. "They know better than to shoot at a German soldier now; but if looks would kill we'd all be dead men a hundred times a day." And he laughed again.