The life of the inhabitants of invaded countries, the honour of their women, the liberty of their youths were not the only blessings, which the Germans attempted to take away from them in contempt of all humanity and all law. Even the property of these inhabitants suffered from invasion. They had to gaze on the ruin of their ravaged homes, which the invader left to be devoured by the flames, and when, deprived of all their possessions, these wretched victims of invasion wanted to take refuge in the temples of God, this last resource was denied them, for the barbarians had sometimes destroyed the church, and sometimes taken possession of it to use as a barracks for their soldiers.

Arson as a Policy

As the French Commission of Inquiry remarked, arson was a common German practice, sometimes used as a weapon of destruction, sometimes as a means of intimidation. “The German army,” adds this Commission, “in order to be prepared for it, has a regular equipment, including torches, grenades, fuses, petrol-sprinklers, rockets which carry inflammable matter, and even little bags containing pastilles of a very inflammable compressed powder. Its incendiary fury is chiefly manifested against churches and monuments interesting from the point of view of art or of history.”

Often the invader was not content with sprinkling the beds of dwelling-houses with petrol, he took care also to heap straw under agricultural machines to destroy them, as well as dwelling-houses, harvests, and the cattle remaining in the stalls. This was done at ChÂteau-sur-Morin by the 76th German regiment.

Often, also, arson was employed as a means to compel people to leave their houses, and to make it easier to pillage. As soon as they entered the villages the Germans, with this object in view, set fire to them. On other occasions they resorted to this method only when the loot was over: then the destruction of the houses of a village was only the crown of their work.

It would be impossible to record in detail acts of this kind committed by Germans on all the invaded territories. We must be content with noting those cases in which parts of large towns were destroyed and whole villages disappeared.

Louvain

The burning of Louvain must be regarded as an operation distinct from the bombardment. The bombardment was slight, but the burning fearful. The burning began on the 26th August at ten p.m. It was systematically carried out. In places where the fire did not catch on, the soldiers went from house to house throwing incendiary grenades.

The largest part of the town, especially those parts of the upper town which included St. Peter’s Church, the university and its library, the greater part of the scientific institutions of the university, and the town theatre were henceforth the prey of the flames.

Everybody knows that the academic library of Louvain was one of the scientific treasures of Europe.

In token of peace all the houses in Louvain were flying a white flag, strips of which might be seen floating over the ruins.

The fire was still going on the next day. Far from taking measures to stop it, the Germans did all they could to keep it going by throwing into the flames all the straw they could find. On the 27th August Louvain looked like an old city of ruins. Drunken soldiers were walking about in it, carrying wine and brandy. The officers, seated in armchairs round tables, drinking like their men, looked on at the ominous results of the disaster. In the streets, the bodies of dead horses were decomposing in the sun, and the stench of putrefaction from them mingled with that of the fire, corrupted the air of the whole town.

The conflagration came to an end on the 2nd September. On that day four more fires were lit by the German soldiers in the Rue Leopold and the Rue Marie-ThÉrÈse. Eight hundred and ninety-four houses were reduced to ashes within the precincts of the town of Louvain, and about five hundred in the suburb Kessel-Loo. The suburb of Berent and the commune of Corbeek-Loo were almost entirely destroyed. The suburb of HeverlÉ was the only one which was respected, perhaps because the Duke of Arenberg, a German subject, has property there.

The destruction of Louvain caused universal indignation, as the destruction of the Cathedral of Reims was to do a little later. In neutral countries public opinion was roused.

In Sweden it was described as a “monstrous act of barbarism against humanity and against civilisation.” In Spain the press gave voice to unanimous protests which recalled the fact that the Flemish treasures of Louvain had been respected from the time of Philip II to Napoleon I. The Portuguese Academy of Sciences invited the Academies of Science in all countries to raise public subscriptions for the purchase of books for the University of Louvain, and to keep alive the protest of the intellectual world against an act of destruction so barbarous. In America public feeling was profoundly stirred. One newspaper made itself the mouthpiece of general opinion on this topic when it declared “Germany could not complain if her crimes recoiled on her own head” (New York Tribune, 21st September, 1914). In Italy, finally, the Giornale d’Italia, the Messagero, the Secolo, the Mattino, the Corriere della Sera, the Perseveranza, the Piccolo (de Trieste) and the Avanti signed a letter inviting the citizens to testify their indignation at the Belgian Legation at Rome.

The Burning of NomÉny

Various crimes committed at NomÉny have had their place in foregoing chapters. But the burning of the place surpassed them all. On the 13th August, 1914, at the cry “the Prussians, the Prussians,” the inhabitants of this small village (in the province of Meurthe-et-Moselle) took refuge in the cellars. The German cavalry and infantry, sword unsheathed and revolver in hand, rushed, shouting, into the village. Mlle. Jacquemot, an eye-witness of these incidents, has described them in the Nancy Est RÉpublicain in these words: “Having taken refuge in a cellar with thirteen other persons, she was followed by the Germans, who could not find where they had hidden. The Prussians,” she said, “went up out of the cellar again, but it was to sprinkle us with petrol through the vent-hole. They set fire to it. We were choking. We should die by burning or asphyxiation. We must go out at any cost. In a choice of deaths it is better to die of a bullet or a bayonet thrust. One of us has a watch. He looks at it. It is five o’clock. We had been there for seven hours! A couple of young girls (for, with the women, there were only some children and old men) offered themselves. Three of us then started out, the two Mlles. Nicolas and I. We went out past the outhouse. Everything in NomÉny was on fire. The whole street was in flames. We must not think of going along the side of the street. Henceforth we have only one hope, i.e. to gain the fields. We went into the first garden we came to.

“As we went through the blazing streets, we had seen dead upon dead. There were some whose heads were split open. An old woman who would have been a hundred years old in the month of November dropped with exhaustion on the way. Of course she died. At the Zambeau infirmary, some bread and a little sausage meat were given us. We slept on the ground, and this morning, Friday, about six o’clock, we had to go packing.”

Senlis

The burning of Senlis is one of the most frightful cases of destruction by fire of which the Germans have been guilty. They had hardly entered it on the 2nd September when they began to loot houses, and afterwards threw into them special bombs which caused fires to break out. As M. Émile Henriot has shown, in L’Illustration, 26th September, 1914: “It was not the bombardment that started the fire. A callous and calculated purpose directed this work of destruction. There are witnesses who affirm it, and in some houses spared by the fire, these incendiary bombs, which did not fulfil the mission, were found afterwards. Private houses, hotels domiciles of rich and poor, modern villas or exquisite mansions of former days—nothing was spared. The beautiful home of the law courts and the sub-prefecture, which dated from the time of Gabriel and Louis is no more.” The cathedral, fortunately, was saved.

“Horror!” exclaimed M. Marcel Hutin of the Echo de Paris; “the whole Rue de la RÉpublique, the principal street of Senlis, has been burnt down. Not a house has been spared. The hotels, private dwelling-houses, the castle, the town hall, the Houssaye Barracks—all, all in ruins.

“On the first day of their arrival, after the bombardment (I was told by the inhabitants, glad in the midst of the mental and material affliction to see a face from Paris) the Germans began to set fire to the houses in the Rue de la RÉpublique. On what pretext? A tobacconist was alleged to have fired on them, and the unfortunate mayor (M. Odent) to have forgotten to cause all arms left in the possession of the citizens to be sent to the town hall.

“And such scenes! Some soldiers deposited incendiary bombs in the houses. Others, a few minutes afterwards, fired on the houses, which, being full of gases, immediately blew up. Nothing of them remains but the walls.

“Scenes of bestial savagery lifted these brutes to the highest pitch of joy: whilst the houses hard by were ablaze and the fire had just reached the topmost story of the HÔtel du Nord, in the basement a dozen Death’s-Head Hussars, tipsy, were playing infernal music on the piano, and singing with wild eyes. Outside some cavalry were forcing their horses to leap through these furnaces! It was frightful. All the night I had a horrible vision of Senlis burnt down.”

Baccarat

“On the morning after their arrival at Baccarat” (on the 25th August, 1914), says M. Jean Rogier in the Petit Parisien, “without excuse, without any pretext that the population had fired on them—for the mere lust of wickedness and destruction they set fire to the town. To begin with, they made an attack on the town hall. Soldiers bearing some resin torches, others cans of oil and petrol, marched as if on parade, to the town hall, splashed the walls with oil, emptied the petrol into the offices and the basement, and then threw their blazing torches into them.

“This hellish baptism accomplished, they waited. Ah! not for long. The flames burst forth with a fearful roaring noise, blackening the walls and rising above the front like a fiery serpent, and soon all was ablaze.

“This beautiful sight roused the brave soldiers. Close to the mayor’s residence and along the whole length of each side of the Rue des Deux Ponts there were beautiful houses, the residences of middle-class citizens. They sprinkled these sixty houses with petrol and with oil and ran their torches against the damp walls, and some minutes afterwards the whole street was on fire. The flames leaped out of the cellars, ran along the walls, rose, grew larger and larger and climbed up to the roof. They joined each other from one side of the street to the other, and, uniting, leaped to the sky like pillars of fire. The whole air was red. Flakes of flame sped outside the town, and left behind a trail of smoke. Up there on the top of the church the weathercock which revolved on the spire of the ruined belfry gleamed like a jewel of iridescent stones, and all at once, in a din of thunder claps, all the houses collapsed and shed on the town a rain of sparks.

“For five days the rubbish smoked.” One hundred and two houses were burnt down.

A Few Figures

These narratives are eloquent and yet they are far from giving an idea of the destruction which the Germans left behind them. The figures tell us still more than the narratives.

In Belgium, in fifteen towns and villages taken at random among the localities which the Germans systematically ravaged by fire, we note that 2191 houses were burnt: in other words, on an average each Belgian locality damaged by the fire of German torches had 146 houses burnt down. Moreover, we have mentioned in our investigations, which were made at haphazard, the names of ten Belgian localities entirely destroyed by fire, including Tirlemont, Linsneau, Andennes, Schaffer, Spontin, etc. It may easily be imagined what would be the result of a systematic inquiry.

In France, the number of villages completely burnt down like NomÉny, Sommeilles, etc., was very great.

Some idea of the damage done may be formed from the fact that in the Meurthe-et-Moselle province alone twenty-two places suffered from fire. Of these twenty-two, two were completely destroyed (Villers-aux-Vents and Sommeilles), and in the other twenty, 663 houses were burnt. This gives an average of twenty-three houses a district.

Burning of Historic Monuments and Castles

It was not merely at Reims during the bombardment, and at Louvain during the fire, that the Germans showed their contempt for monuments and the treasures of art and science contained in them. In the following chapter we shall take note of the loot carried on in the interiors of these buildings. Here we speak only of fire and general destruction. Several castles were burnt down: those of Varolles, Moque-Souris, Sparre (in Chierry), the chÂteau of Brumetz (Aisne province), the town hall of LunÉville, the house of M. Alberic Magnard, author of BÉrÉnice (at Baron), who saw all the works of art accumulated there, in value exceeding a million francs, destroyed by fire. In Poland, the town hall of Szydlowice, an architectural masterpiece, was destroyed, notwithstanding the 5000 crowns which the inhabitants of the place paid to the German commandant to secure its preservation.

Sacrilegious Fires

None the more were churches spared. The invader, the enemy alike of his foe’s taste and of his religious faith, spent as it were a double ferocity on the work of destroying the temples of God.

“The church at Aerschot,” writes the Belgian Commission of Inquiry in one of its reports, “is a lamentable spectacle. Its three entrances and those of the sacristy have been more or less consumed. The entrance leading to the nave, and the side entrance on the right, both of massive oak, seem to have been hammered with a battering-ram after the flames had reached them.”

The same was the case at RÉvigny, the church which was classed among historic monuments, and in many other Belgian and French villages which, when they were totally or partially destroyed by fire, also lost the home of their religion.

Desecration of Churches

The Germans were not content with destruction. On several occasions they went out of their way to desecrate holy places; so much perversity, worse even than barbarism, is there in the regular habits of this nation and in the education which they receive.

The church of Aerschot was not merely burned, it was also polluted; and the following narrative, given by a woman who was an eye-witness, a correspondent of the Evening News (of 24th September, 1914), will help to give us some idea of what went on there—

“On the high altar,” wrote this journalist, “there were three empty champagne bottles, two rum, a broken bordeaux bottle and five beer bottles. In the confessionals other champagne, brandy and beer bottles, also empty.

“On the marble flags, heaps of straw everywhere, heaps of bottles, rubbish and filth. On the forms, on the chairs, bottles and still more bottles, champagne, beer, rum, bordeaux, burgundy and brandy. In all directions wherever we cast our eyes, to whatever part of the church we looked, there were nothing but bottles by the hundred, by the thousand, perhaps; everywhere bottles, bottles, bottles.

“But the sacristan in a trembling voice appealed to me. ‘Madame, do look!’ and he showed me a white marble bas-relief representing the Virgin. They had quite broken the head of the Virgin!

“A little further away there were splendid wood carvings, representing an episode in the life of Christ. They burnt the face and half the body of Christ! Why? For the mere pleasure of destruction, as they slashed with the sword or bayonet the tapestries and costly lace which covered the altar. On the walls hung priceless paintings, the work of Flemish old masters. These they cut along the frames.

“They brought a pig into a little chapel, to the right of the nave, and killed it there.

“On all sides the walls and flagstones bore the marks of prancing horses which had been stabled in the sanctuary.” A pyx was taken away by the Germans from the church of Hofstade. A Belgian priest found the gilt copper foot of it on the way into the village. All the precious stones which adorned it had been taken away, and the Germans also kept the upper part of silver gilt.

In France, likewise, churches were desecrated, and the Germans used that of Betz as a barracks. When they had gone, one could see in it straw mattresses lying on the flagstones, empty bottles in rows on the altar steps, the remains of food on the forms and chairs, a leg-of-mutton bone thrown into the font, etc.

On the 25th October a battalion of the 123rd infantry regiment of Wurtemburg Landwehr entered the village of Seugern, at the bottom of the Guebwiller valley and, on a signal from their leader, immediately set fire to it. The latter, a lieutenant, reserved for himself the church, which he entered at the head of ten men. In obedience to their officer’s orders the gang started operations by destroying the organ, then broke down the confessionals and the high altar, and, making a heap of images in the nave, drenched them all with petrol.

A single Catholic soldier refused to take part in this infamous work. He was, therefore, disarmed and shot the following morning. The arrival of the French Chasseurs Alpins fortunately prevented the church, which had been polluted, from being devoured by fire as well.

The little church of Vitrimont (a league away from Vitrimont) was also desecrated by the Germans. Its stained glass was shattered, its door smashed to pieces, and in the nave the sacrilegious invaders left nothing but a confused heap of timber, plaster, jagged benches, broken glass. Vestments of the priests, the images of the saints, the costly cloths, the beautiful embroidered work, the trimmings of the altar, and the tiny treasure of the sacristy were all found on the road in the mud.

In Russia

Instances of desecration of churches, Orthodox and Catholic, were still more numerous in Russia. The cause of this lies in the orders which were given to attack the Russian or Polish peasant through his religion, the most sacred of his possessions.

The worst of these outrages was that suffered by the famous church of Our Lady at Tchenstokhova. It is the great centre of national pilgrimage, to which more than a million people go each year. The Germans did not shrink from desecrating this renowned sanctuary and looting the famous convent of the Virgin. In particular the two churches at Radom (in the province of Kielce) suffered from the German invasion. The soldiers, who spent the night there, littered the ground with straw, broke the locks of the drawers and the chests, smashed the various images and left everything in frightful disorder.

At Mlava the churches and synagogues were converted into barracks. At Souvalki, after the Germans had gone, it was shown that they had made a stable of the church, for round about were lying the droppings of horses, and hooks and rings had been fastened to the walls. On the altar there were traces of a meal; beside the shattered remnants of the clock several empty bottles and dirty cloths had been left behind, and there were marks of filthy stains. The vestments of the priests had been used to cover horses; the sacrilegious plunderers had carried off the candelabra and the altar cloth.

At Calvaire (in the province of Kovno) the Germans threw the altar-piece, the cross, and various other images into the privies. At Grasewo, Krasno, Topoleza, Konsk and Kielce, similar acts were noted. At Mariampol (in the province of Kovno) the Germans sacked the college library, forced their way into the church and desecrated the altar by dining at it. The remains of this dinner and dirty stockings were found under the altar.

Finally, at Volkawisky two churches were desecrated. One was sacked and its silver cross stolen; the other, the regimental church, was converted into a barracks, and the priests’ vestments were used as dishcloths.

German Admissions

We must not omit the chapter of admissions. So far as the burning of Aerschot is concerned, we find one of these admissions in the KÖlnische Zeitung, whose correspondent admits that “the sight was alarming.” He adds that “the town was ablaze on all sides” and that “the barrels of spirits of wine blew up with a deafening clatter.”

The Saxon officer of the 178th regiment, whose evidence we have already put on record, writes that “the fine village of GuÉ-d’Hossus (Ardennes) was abandoned to the flames, although so far as I could see it was innocent.”

A soldier of the 32nd reserve infantry regiment notes in his pocket-book that “the streets of Creil were burnt down” by way of reprisals and because the iron bridge was blown up.

A soldier of the reserve named Schaulter writes: “The crack of rifle shots was heard when we left Ovela, but, in it, fire, women, and our leavings.” So common was the practice of which he mentions one result, that he did not think it necessary to give any details. Arson, pillage, sacrilege, violation, such were the solemn rites of invasion.

The non-commissioned officer, Hermann Levith, of the 160th infantry regiment, 8th corps, says that “the enemy occupied the village of BiÈvre,” and adds, “We took the village, then burnt nearly all the houses.” Another, Private Schiller, of the 133rd infantry regiment, 19th corps, writes: “It was at Haybes (Ardennes) that on the 24th August, we had our first battle. The second battalion entered the village, searched the houses, sacked them and burnt those from which any one had fired.” A Bavarian soldier, Reishaupt, of the 3rd infantry regiment, 1st Bavarian corps, writes: “Parux (Meurthe-et-Moselle) was the first village we burnt; after that the dance began—one village after another.”

Would it not have been believed that setting fire to a country was part of the methods of attack and of acts permitted to a conqueror? What formerly was an exceptional occurrence, which remained in the memory of men as an unheard-of crime, is in German eyes the usual way of war.