, and which frequently are born
in the instant and molded on the instant to suit the purposes of those
who create them. And Louvain is perhaps the most finished and perfect
example we have in this world to-day to show the consequences of such a
clash.

I am not going to try to describe Louvain. Others have done that
competently. The Belgians were approximately correct when they said
Louvain had been destroyed. The Germans were technically right when
they said not over twenty per cent of its area had been reduced; but
that twenty per cent included practically the whole business district,
practically all the better class of homes, the university, the
cathedral, the main thoroughfares, the principal hotels and shops and
cafes. The famous town hall alone stood unscathed; it was saved by
German soldiers from the common fate of all things about it. What
remained, in historic value and in physical beauty, and even in tangible
property value, was much less than what was gone forever.

I sought out the hotel near the station where we had stayed, as enforced
guests of the German army, for three days in August. Its site was a
leveled gray mass, sodden, wrecked past all redemption; ruined beyond
all thought of salvage. I looked for the little inn at which we had
dined. Its front wall littered the street and its interior was a jumble
of worthlessness. I wondered again as I had wondered many times before
what had become of its proprietor--the dainty, gentle little woman whose
misshapen figure told us she was near the time for her baby.

I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk cafe where we
sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation--August
twenty-first, I think, was the date--and watched the sun go out in
eclipse like a copper disk. We did not know it then, but it was
Louvain's bloody eclipse we saw presaged that day in the suddenly
darkened heavens. Even the lines of the sidewalks were loSt. The road
was piled high with broken, fire-smudged masonry. The building behind
was a building no longer. It was a husk of a house, open to the sky,
backless and front-less, and fit only to tumble down in the next high
wind.

As we stood before the empty railroad station, in what I veritably
believe to be the forlornest spot there is on this earth, a woman in a
shawl came whining to sell us postal cards, on which were views of the
desolation that was all about us.

"Please buy some pictures," sh