uffered little
damage, are not silent, for one of the Landsturm companies is quartered
there. I found half a hundred of them and two cows in the university
quadrangle or campus. The men were all unshaven, but of a good-natured
sort, and many were the rough German jokes as they watched a comrade
milking the cows preparatory to their slaughter on the spot by the
company butcher, who stood in waiting, while at the same time the
gray-haired university castellan was getting ready to take a time
exposure of the cows.

"And yet they say we Germans are barbarians," laughed an under officer.
"I bet you won't find that the French soldiers, or the highly civilized
English gentlemen, either, have a photographer come to take a picture of
the cows they are about to eat."

The venerable university guardian continued to do a brisk business
making group pictures and solo portraits of Landsturm under officers and
men at two francs per dozen postcards, till a Lieutenant appeared on the
scene and the bugle sounded in the court for "boot inspection." All
promptly lined up in double file against the brick university wall and
presented feet for the critical eye of the inspector--all except the
company cooks, who were busy among their pots and pans and open-air cook
stoves set up in the academic stone portico.

The last of the former students of the University of Louvain was
probably the well-dressed, meek-looking young Chinese, eating luncheon
at the near-by restaurant--the only one open in town. The German
soldiers, fortunately, did not mistake him for a Japanese, and he has
not been molested.

There are touches of grim humor among the ruins. Here on the main
street, for example, is a pink placard stuck on a stick on top of the
heap of brick and mortar that was once a store. It reads: "Elegant
corsets: Removed to Rue Malines 21." And again, on a number of houses
that escaped the torch are pasted neatly printed little signs bearing
the legend: "This house is to be protected. Soldiers are not allowed to
enter houses or to set fire to them without orders from the
Kommandantur."

The inhabitants who have no stores to keep seem continually to wander
aimlessly in the streets; and here, too, is the sight, common now all
over Belgium, of many women with children begging. Especially they
linger around the entrances to the barracks, for hunger has given them a
keen nose for bread, and they have soon learned that the soldier will
give them what