The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-06-08
ALREADY
 STARTS BUILDING ATOP HER RUINS
Once Beautiful Town, Razed By Shells, Will Be
 "Made Over"

Louvain. June s.-Surrounded by green fields that lportend an unusual harvest and transform all Belgium from the scene of desolatIon that has been often pictured since the begin ming of the war, Louvain still stands as a monumental wreck. Little of it's former life has crept back into it's streets and the walls of practically all of its buildings are still crumbling ruins that have 4lot been removed and apparently will not be. Here and there a wooden shack has been erect ed by some e1terprising vendor of tobacco or post cardss but as a city it is still uninhabitable.
 Yet Louvain is not entirely dead, and in one most important particu- lar work of renovation is going on apace-the renovation and restitution of its wonderful cathedral, which es- caped destruction only by a seeming miracle The church now is in the hands of a score of workmen who are paipstakingly restoring those DOT tions of the walls which are shaky or damaged, the little panes of glass not stained glass-which were blown out by bomb explosions and the altar which was burned by shell that caught fire after it tore through the roof above.
 Competent architects who have visited the cathedral say that it has
  rible shelling that destroyed the rest of Louvain and claim that with a very little money it can be put back into the shape in which it was before the war. The beautiful stained glass in the windows to the rear of the a1- tar is absolutely undannaged- The altar picture was removed before the shell came which tore open the roof. and the majority of the works of art and other! valuab1es in the building are now safely stored in the base Inent of the Hotel de Vile across the way-a1most the only other structure in Louvain that was not razed.
 It is conceivab1y only Louvain's s total demolition that has prevented efforts to rebuild it, for that has been accomplished in many other of the Belgian cities that were wrecked by ward France It has been accom- pIished so completely in some cases that the ignorant visitor would never know there had been any war in the little country.
 This is true of Namur, to the south ward. Nannur played a conspicuous 1 part in the early days of the waEs and by no means escaped without damage yet little of 1t is in evidence today, particularly among the forts that were held to be 1nvincible, and that today probably are so. Stand ing high above the River Mouse. these forts present an absolutely unbroken and undamaged appearance. Where the great shells burst in the masonry one can only guess at, for the holes are gone. Only the hotel at the very top of the hill on which the fortifl- cations are built is still in a state of ruin
 In this hotel, so goes the story that many maintain is a fairy tale, there was the telephone centra1 into which ran the wires from all the forts. The Germans, advancing, are supposed to have learned of this vital fact, and 1 to have trained guns effectively on 1 this building first of all, so that the 1 connecting lines were cut and no one 1 fort had any means of communication with any others.
 The German officers in Namur to- day smile as they tell the story and shake their heads. They admit that 1 it is quite possible that the Germans should have learned the secret of the position of sscentral'' and also that the aim of the guns might have been accurate enough to destroy the build l ing, but they cannot quite believe that l the BeAgians could have made so grave a military mistake as to expose their lines of communication, and prefer to think that the hotel was l burned in inqendiary fashion and the loss blamed onto the invaders
 In the country portions of Bel 1 giun today there is scarcely a trace of war beyond an occasional ruined building. As in Northern France, the | landscape is infinitely more attractive than of old because the extensive cul- | ture of sugar beets. with their brown 1 growth, has been discontinued, and wheat and corn with green shoots, have been substituted. The destruction in 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 na- | ture in the springtime have made of l it once more a pleasantly smiling g country that taxes the imagination to draw 8, picture of war in progress.