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 incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot.
The day before the Germans had sentenced Louvain to become a wilderness, and with German system and love of thoroughness they left Louvain an empty, blackened shell.

The reason for this appeal to the torch and the execution of non-combatants, as given to Mr.
Whitlock and myself on the morning I left Brussels by General von Lutwitz, the military governor, was this: The day before, while the German military commander of the troops in Louvain was at the Hotel de Ville talking to the burgomaster, a son of the burgomaster, with an automatic pistol, shot the chief of staff and German staff surgeons.
Lutwitz claimed this was the signal for the civil guard, in civilian clothes on the roofs, to fire upon the German soldiers in the open square below.

He said also the Belgians had quick-firing guns, brought from Antwerp.