"In agreement with the German Military authority I invite the inhabitants of Louvain to return to the city, and to take up again their usual occupations.
We met only a few Germans on the road from Brussels to Charleroi, and found no garrison except in the townlet Hal. Very little burning had taken place on this road, but so much the more plundering and looting. A woman took us all over her house in the neighbourhood of Brussels, to show us the total wrecking. Small pieces of furniture were generally taken away, but stoves, kitcheners, and cupboards were smashed. She herself had had her face badly wounded, because she had hidden herself in the cellar when the Germans came near, and they had beaten her out of that with their rifle-butts. Many other women were treated in the same manner.
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ONE:It was a cruel sight. At a tolerably quick pace59 hundreds of soldiers marched out in the direction of the fort, dragging light ordnance with them. One of the officers explained to me that the big guns could not yet operate here; and now a division of foot-artillery was commanded to occupy a small hill near the fort. The big guns had to support them on the way. The guns roared as if all the thunderbolts of heaven had been flung into space. The smoke of the powder poisoned the air and made me cough. Gradually my surroundings were enveloped in a thin haze, which became denser and more suffocating the longer the guns roared. And at last those hundreds of men, dragging their guns along the byways, looked merely like shades.
3. The vertical movement of material, although it consumes more power, is more economical than horizontal handling, because less floor room and ground surface is required.I had great trouble to make her understand that I was a Netherlander; and that changed at once her opinion for the Germans. She told me then that her husband and children had fled to The Netherlands, as had most of the inhabitants, and29 that she was left behind merely because she dawdled too long. And now she was constantly afraid that they might fire her house as they did the others, and murder her ... for such had been the fate of several of the villagers. Even whole families had been killed.Ohho-ho! Suspicious Sandy!ho-ho!