The Giving up of Louvain to ‘Military Execution’, from The Spectator, 5 September 1914:
GERMANY has dealt herself the hardest blow which she has yet suffered in the war. By burning Louvain, killing we know not how many of its inhabitants, and turning the rest (say nearly forty thousand men, women, and children) adrift in the fields and on the pillaged countryside, she has forfeited the consideration of decent men. She has committed a deed which two centuries of exemplary conduct could scarcely efface. “German” must for a long time to come be almost synonymous with those epithets of nationality which we use to denote barbaric behaviour, particularly barbarism directed against a cultured conception of life. Germany must henceforth occupy a place with the Vandals and the Huns. Let us not confuse this piece of Vandalism, or Germanism, with the outbreak of an over-tried, nerve- racked, hungry, or exasperated soldiery.
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