I left Brussels on August 27th with Gerald Morgan and Will Irwin, of
Collier's, on a train carrying English prisoners and German wounded.
In times of peace the trip to the German border lasts three hours, but
in making it we were twenty-six hours, and by order of the authorities
we were forbidden to leave the train.

Carriages with cushions naturally were reserved for the wounded, so
we slept on wooden benches and on the floor. It was not possible to
obtain food, and water was as scarce. At Graesbeek, ten miles from
Brussels, we first saw houses on fire. They continued with us to
Liege.

Village after village had been completely wrecked. In his march to the
sea Sherman lived on the country. He did not destroy it, and as
against the burning of Columbia must be placed to the discredit of the
Germans the wiping out of an entire countryside.

For many miles we saw procession after procession of peasants
fleeing from one burning village, which had been their home, to other
villages, to find only blackened walls and smouldering ashes. In no
part of northern Europe is there a countryside fairer than that
between Aix-la-Chapelle and Brussels, but the Germans had made of
it a graveyard. It looked as though a cyclone had uprooted its houses,
gardens, and orchards and a prairie fire had followed.

At seven o'clock in the evening we arrived at what for six hundred
years had been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it,
and to hide their work kept us locked in the railroad carriages. But the
story was written against the sky, was told to us by German soldiers