were the ghastly evidences. Doors had
been smashed in with rifle-butts and boot-heels; windows had been
broken; furniture had been wantonly destroyed; pictures had been
torn from the walls; mattresses had been ripped open with bayonets in
search of valuables; drawers had been emptied upon the floors; the
outer walls of the houses were spattered with blood and pock-marked
with bullets; the sidewalks were slippery with broken wine-bottles;
the streets were strewn with women's clothing. It needed no one to
tell us the details of that orgy of blood and lust. The story was
so plainly written that anyone could read it.

For a mile we drove the car slowly between the blackened walls of
fire-gutted buildings. This was no accidental conflagration, mind you,
for scattered here and there were houses which stood undamaged
and in every such case there was scrawled with chalk upon their
doors "Gute Leute. Nicht zu plundern." (Good people. Do not
plunder.)

The Germans went about the work of house-burning as
systematically as they did everything else. They had various devices
for starting conflagrations, all of them effective. At Aerschot and
Louvain they broke the windows of the houses and threw in sticks
which had been soaked in oil and dipped in sulphur. Elsewhere they
used tiny, black tablets, about the size of cough lozenges, made of
some highly inflammable composition, to which they touched a
match. At Termonde, which they destroyed in spite of the fact that
the inhabitants had evacuated the city before their arrival, they used
a motor-car equipped with a large tank for petrol, a pump, a hose,
and a spraying-nozzle. The car was run slowly through the streets,
one soldier working the pump and another spraying the fronts of the
houses. Then they set fire to them. Oh, yes, they were very
methodical about it all, those Germans.

Despite the scowls of the soldiers, I attempted to talk with some of
the women huddled in front of a bakery waiting for a distribution of
bread, but the poor creatures were too terror-stricken to do more
than stare at us with wide, beseeching eyes. Those eyes will always
haunt me. I wonder if they do not sometimes haunt the Germans.
But a little episode that occurred as we were leaving the city did
more than anything else to bring home the horror of it all. We
passed a little girl of nine or ten and I stopped the car to ask the
way. Instantly she held both hands above her head and began to
scream for me