The Hattiesburg news. (Hattiesburg, Miss.) 1908-1917, 1915-06-18

insly restoring those portions of the
walls which are shaky or damaged,
the little panes of glass-not stained
which were blown out by bomb explo-
sions, and the altar which was burned
by a shell that caught fire after it tore
through the roof above.
Competent architects who have Wis
tied the cathedral say that it has been
in no way weakened by the terrible
Smelling that destroyed the rest OF
Louyaine, and claim that with a very
little money it can be put back lto
the shape in which it was before the
war. The beautiful stained glass in
the windows to the rear of the altar
is absolutely unchanged. The altar
picture was removed before the shell
came which tore open the roof, and
the majority of the works of art and
other valuables in the building are
now safely stored in the basement Of
the Hotel de Vile across the way-al-
most the only other structure in Lou
vain that was not RACED.
1t is conceivably only Louvains to,
forts to rebuild it, for that has been
accomplished in many other of the
al ntn oft Nrnr hxr q
Germans as they advanced toward
France. 1t has been accomplished so
completely in some cases that the ig-
nOrant visitor would never know there
had been any war in the little coun-
try.
This is true of Namur, to the south
ward. Namur played a conspicuous
part in the early days of the war, and
by no means escaped without dam
age yet little of it is in evidence to-
day, practically among the forts that
were held to be invincible, and that
today probably are so. Standing high
above the River Meuse, these forts
present an absolutely unbroken and
unchanged appearance. Where the
great shells burst in the masonry one
can only guess at, for the holes are
gone. Only the hotel at the top of
the hill on which the Notifications
are built is still in a state of ruin.
In this hotel, go goes the story that
many maintain is a fairy tale, there
was the telephone central into which
ran the wires from all the forts. The
Germans, advancing, are supposed to
have learned of this vital fact, and to
have trained their guns effectively on
this building first of all, so that the
connecting lines were cut and no one
fort had any means of communicating
with any other.
The German officers in Namur to-
day smile as they tell the story and
shake their heads. They admit that
it is quite possible that the Germans
should have learned the secret of the
position of Central and also that
| the aim of the guns might have beer
accurate enough to destroy the build
ing but they cannot quite believe thai
/ the Belgians could have made sc
| grave a military mistake as to eX
pose their lines of communication
and prefer to think that the hotel was
burned in incendiary fashion and the
loss blamed onto the invaders.
In the country portions of Belgium
today there is scarcely trace of wal
| beyond an occasional ruined building
AS in northern France, the landscape
| is infinitely more attractive than oil
| old because the extensive culture OF
sugar beets, with their brown growth
has been discontinued, and wheat and
corn, with green shoots, have been
substituted
The destruction of Belgium may
have been overestimated and eXag
gerated in the beginning. Whether
that or not, the combination of the
reconstruction efforts of the victors
and invaders and the forces of nature