built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should
have been as precious to man, as sacred and as intangible as the
Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the Piazza
del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at
all times wrung a cry of admiration from the most indifferent, an
ornament which men hoped was imperishable, one of those things of
beauty which, in the words of the poet, are a joy forever.


2

I cannot believe that it no longer exists; and yet in this horrible
war we have to believe everything and, above all, the worst. Now,
fatally and inevitably, it will be the turn of the Belfry of Bruges;
and then the tide of barbarians will rise against Ghent and Antwerp
and Brussels; and there will forthwith disappear one of those portions
of the world's surface in which was hoarded the greatest wealth of
beauty and of memories and of the stuff of history. We did what we
could to preserve it; we could do no more. The most heroic of armies
are powerless to prevent the bandits whom they are driving back from
murdering the women and children or from deliberately and uselessly
destroying all that they find along their path of retreat. There is
only one hope left us: the immediate and imperious intervention of
the neutral powers. It is towards them that we turn our tortured gaze.
Two great nations notably--Italy and the United States--hold in their
hands the fate of these last treasures, whose loss would one day be
reckoned among the heaviest and the most irreparable that have been
suffered in the course of long centuries of human civilization. They
can do what they will; it is time for them to do that which it is no
longer lawful to leave undone. By its frantic lies, the beast from