Now only one of the churches stood, as well as the building where the
officers were quartered, the Museum of Antiquity, and perhaps a
dozen others. Across the moat, which led to the gateway of what
were formerly the inner fortifications, were piles of rotting horseflesh.
The bronze statue of De Smet, the Jesuit missionary, looked calmly
on the scene. All the rest was blotted out. There was no sign of
hot-tempered impetuous work of a handful of drunken Uhlans, a fire
started in anger and driven by the wind throughout the entire town.
There was not a breath of wind. That the night was calm was shown
by the fact that here and there single houses, even houses built of
boards, were spared at the commander's word. The convent was
burnt and pillaged, stones and mortar littered the street in front of the
Hotel de Ville, and upon the sidewalk lay the famous bells which
came crashing to the street below when shells burst in the belfry.
From cellar to garret nearly every remaining house was
systematically drenched with naphtha and the torch applied, and
when all was over hundreds of gallons were tossed into the River
Scheldt. Over a small group of houses in the poorer section of the
city, where the prostitutes were quartered, grim Prussian humor, or
perhaps a sense of value received, had prompted the conquerors to
write in great white chalk marks in German script, "Gute Leute. Nicht
brennen!" (Good people. Do not burn!)

For an hour we walked through the silence of ashes and stone,
stumbling over timber and debris, tangled and twisted wire, a fallen
statue, broken bells or the cross-piece of a spire; we made our way
through piles of beds, chairs, singed mattresses, and stepped over
the carcass of a horse with its belly bloated and flies feasting on its
glassy eyes. We entered an apothecary shop where the clock still
ticked upon the counter. Thinking there could be no reason of war to