"Other parts of my diocese, which I have not had time to visit, have in a like manner, been laid waste. Churches, schools, asylums, hospitals, convents in great numbers are in ruins. Entire villages have all but disappeared. At Werchter Wackerzeel, for instance, out of three hundred and eighty homes one hundred and thirty remain. At Tremeloo, two-thirds of the village is overthrown. At Beuken, out of one hundred houses twenty are standing. At Schaffen, one hundred and eighty-nine houses out of two hundred are destroyed; eleven still stand. At Louvain, a third of the buildings are down, one thousand and seventy-four dwellings have disappeared. On the town land and in the suburbs, one thousand six hundred and twenty-three houses have been burned. "In this dear city of Louvain, perpetually in my thoughts, the magnificent church of St. Peter will never recover its former splendour. The ancient college of St. Ives, the art schools, the consular and commercial schools of the University, the old markets, our rich library with its collections, its unique and unpublished manuscripts, its archives, its gallery of great portraits of illustrious rectors, chancellors, professors, dating from the time of its foundation, which preserved for its masters and students alike a noble tradition, and was an incitement to their studies--all this accumulation of intellectual, of historic and artistic riches, the fruit of the labour of five centuries--all is in the dust.... "Thousands of Belgian citizens have been deported to the prisons of Germany, to Munsterlagen, to Celle, to Magdeburg. At Munsterlagen alone, three thousand one hundred civil prisoners were numbered. History will tell of the physical and mental torments of their long martyrdom. "Hundreds of innocent men were shot. I possess no complete necrology; but I know there were ninety-one shot at Aerschot and that there, under pain of death, their fellow citizens were compelled to dig their graves. In the Louvain group of communes one hundred and seventy-six persons, men and women, old men and sucklings, rich and poor, in health and sickness, were shot or burned.... "We can neither number our dead nor compute the measure of our ruins. And what would it be if we turned our sad steps toward Liège, Namur, Audennes, Dinant, Tamines, Charleroi, and elsewhere? Families hitherto living at ease, now in bitter want; all commerce at an end, all careers ruined, industry at a standstill; thousands upon thousands of working men without employment; working men, shop girls, humble servants, without means of earning their bread, and poor souls forlorn on the bed of sickness and fever, crying, 'O Lord, how long, how long?'