After this you carry your own luggage to the train, which is thoughtfully kept waiting a quarter of a mile outside the station, in rain or snow, and sit down in a freezing carriage without any light or heating, but possibly with one or more windows smashed. Half an hour or so after the fixed time the train begins to move; a little notice, in German naturally, tells you not to put your head outside the window while crossing a bridge because sentries will shoot at you, and another notice says that, owing to the crisis, you may be asked to step out of the carriage at any moment and without any right to protest, even if you happen to have the pluck to do so. And ultimately, after hours waiting in intermediate railway stations, after changing trains two or three times on a ten miles' fare, you sometimes arrive; you and your luggage are searched once again, and then you are let out. I feel sure most of those gentlemen got their iron crosses for much less than this Odyssey. * * * It was five o'clock in the afternoon when I walked out of Louvain station on to a muddy piece of uneven ground surrounded by ruins which were once the station square. It was a grey day, and a few stray flakes of snow were blown by the icy whirlwind in all directions. The weather was perfectly consonant with the general aspect of the town. Right and left I could discover nothing but ruins; it was hard to tell which was the road and which the site of former buildings. Enormous masses of calcinated bricks and stones are all that remain of the houses which have collapsed; as for the others which are still standing, their appearance is still more tragic. All the inside part, the ceilings, the staircases, the roofs, have been burned away, and the outer wall, all out of perpendicular, still shows the pots of flowers, the iron bars, and the metallic parts of the shutters which were burned away. Entire rows of houses protrude on the street as if they are going to collapse at any minute; others lean backwards just as if they were frightened; others are all leaning on the right or the left side as if a terrible wind had forced them into that unnatural position. Here at another spot the walls of two houses touch each other at the top, forming a sort of pointed arch. The steeple of a little church leans far more than the famous Pisa Tower.