Of Malines little of the material fabric of the town has suffered, with the exception of the cathedral. Through about twenty other houses shells had torn gashes as erratic as those which apparently a bullet tears through living tissue. But most of the streets remain unchanged. This statement is not, perhaps, as reassuring as it sounds. It is as if you were to say, in speaking of an attack on Oxford, that only the colleges had suffered. Malines is not only a cathedral city; the cathedral, situated geographically at its heart, dominates its whole economy. It is the spiritual centre of Belgium. The Cardinal Archbishop’s palace, unpretentious between its thick trees and its quiet canal, is in some sense the moral capital of this valorous people. Like Louvain, Malines got its bread largely by education. Its manufacturing industries, so to say, radiated from the cathedral. It printed missals and breviaries. It made lace for ecclesiastical vestments, and then other lace. It cut and carved heavy oak into furniture for churches, and then it made other furniture. Every shell launched against the cathedral was therefore launched against the very being and essence of Malines city. I am not ashamed to confess that when I, an Irish Catholic, walked into the Grand’ Place and saw the stamp of Berlin imprinted on those good grey walls I did not think at once of material injury, or money, or subscriptions. What came was anger against the desecration of a holy place. My mind said to me, “This is how Nietzsche has, from his grave, spat, as he wished to spit, upon Nazareth.” A picture came of that sinister Quixote, who made cruelty his sacrament, and who was yet so humanly dear in some of his moods, standing behind a great Krupp howitzer and shouting, “Charlottenburg _contra_ Christ. I back Charlottenburg!” One notices in some of the English papers protests against the too ready acceptance of unanalysed and unconfirmed “atrocities.” So liable is panic to mix myth with fact that I have pleaded more than once for the constitution of an International Commission to examine all the evidence. But in the meantime we find it difficult to divest ourselves of the faculty of inference. If you come, during time of war, upon a civilian, hanging by the neck, with his hands tied behind his back, and a fire burning under him, the theory of suicide or accident does not seem to embrace the full scope of the fact. A similar process of reasoning forces you to the conclusion that the Germans would not have hit Malines Cathedral so often if they had not aimed at it. The other buildings struck by shells are either on the line of fire to the Grand’ Place or in its immediate neighbourhood.