Outside, the streets are nearly deserted. A few soldiers, a few ragged people begging for a copper or a piece of bread, these I see; a few of the old inhabitants searching the remains of their homes and contemplating, with the look of somebody who sees an old friend, every bit of metal, every fragment of pottery they happen to find. They have constructed temporary shelters and collected therein what the flames have spared. Some are looking under their house ruins for a member of the family who has disappeared. Every day a new corpse is found. In every square are fresh graves, and the very day of my visit five more victims of German violence had been buried right in the middle of the station square, all round the statue of Van der Weyer, which has been respected probably as an homage to its ugliness. The Kommandant of Louvain insisted that the victims should be buried there, and not in the cemetery, "to set a good example!" In this phrase is the reason of the destruction of the harmless little town--a reason which has puzzled the whole world. For the most dreadful part of the destruction of Louvain is that there has been no fighting, no shelling, nothing of what we generally understand by the word war. The town had been quietly occupied by the Germans, and they forced the population to leave their houses without carrying anything with them. People who tried to save anything were robbed of what they had taken with them, the earrings were pulled out of the women's ears (I have seen a body with both the ear-lobes torn in two), the pockets searched, and in more than one case anybody who was found to be carrying something was immediately shot. Petrol and some other new liquid combustible quite recently discovered in a Berlin laboratory, and which the Louvain people have christened "Colofogne du Diable," were poured abundantly on the whole town, except, perhaps, on twenty houses inhabited by Germans. I saw, in one of the station rooms, the fire engines which have been used for this purpose, fire engines which bear the arms of the City of Louvain, and which, with cruel irony, were used to set fire to the town they had been created to save. Specially made bombs were thrown into every house, and the Germans retired outside the town on the great boulevard to enjoy a spectacle really worthy of Nero. But at Louvain the Germans have surpassed Nero. While the town was still burning all the population, regardless of age or sex, was arranged in a single line near Mont César. And then the most dreadful thing happened. The Romans, to subdue soldiers' rebellions, invented a punishment which always seemed to the world the limit of cruelty--decimation.