as far away as Aix-la-Chapelle and from Liege and many from
Brussels. They bought postal cards and climbed about over the mountain
ranges of waste, and they mined in the debris mounds for souvenirs.
Altogether, I suppose some of them regarded it as a kind of picnic.
Personally I should rather go to a morgue for a picnic than to Louvain
as it looks to-day. I tried hard, both in Germany among the German
soldiers and in Belgium among the Belgians, to get at the truth about
Louvain. The Germans said the outbreak was planned, and that firing
broke out at a given signal in various quarters of the town; that, from
windows and basements and roofs, bullets rained on them; and that the
fighting continued until they had smoked the last of the inhabitants
from their houses with fire and put them to death as they fled. The
Belgians proclaimed just as stoutly that, mistaking an on marching
regiment for enemies, the Germans fired on their own people; and then,
in rage at having committed such an error and to cover it up, they
turned on the townspeople and mixed massacre with pillaging and burning
for the better part of a night and a day.

I could, I think, sense something of the viewpoint of each. To the
Belgian, a German in his home or in his town was no more than an armed
housebreaker. What did he care for the code of war? He was not
responsible for the war. He had no share in framing the code. He took
his gun, and when the chance came he fired---and fired to kill.
Perhaps, at first, he did not know that by that same act he forfeited
his life and sacrificed his home and jeopardized the lives and homes of
all his neighbors. Perhaps in the blind fury of the moment he did not
much care.

Take the German soldier: He had proved he was ready to meet his enemy in
the open and to fight him there. When his comrade fell at his side,
struck down by an unseen, skulking foe, who lurked behind a hedge or a
chimney, he saw red and he did red deeds. That in his reprisals he went
farther than some might have gone under similar conditions is rather to
have been expected. In point of organization, in discipline, and in the
enactment of a terribly stern, terribly deadly course of conduct for
just such emergencies, his masters had gone farther than the heads of
any modern army ever went before. You see, all the laboriously built-up
ethics of civilized peace came into direct conflict with the bloody
ethics of war, which are never civilized