The Archive · 1914

The Destruction of Louvain

WITH TORCH AND DYNAMITE." — A VIVID STORY OF A GREAT CRIME — By Richard Harding Davis — (SPECIAL CABLE TO THE " CHICAGO

London, Aug. 31.

Thursday afternoon I left Brussels and have just arrived in London. For two hours Thursday night I was in what for 600 years had been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it and to hide their work kept us locked in the road carriages, but the story was written against the sky and was told to us by German soldiers, inooherent with excess. We could read it! in the fates of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot.

Wednesday the Germans _sentenced Louvain to become a wilderness and with German system and love of thoroughness left Louvain as empty as a blackened shell. The'

Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.

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