Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1918-05-21
CONTINUED from Last Issus)

7 OUVAIN will remain perhaps
the classic instance of schreck-
Ichkeit; it resumes and sums
u, ii the general mind the sinister
history of those terrible times. But
ii was not the worst; Wise was worse,
and so was Dinant, and so was Aers-
chOt, and worst of all, perhaps, was
Tamines. Wise was the tirst; 1t was
near there that on the second of All
gust the Germans, willfully violating
their treaty, invaded the little land
they had sworn to protect. Going
from st. Remy along the road of the
Three Chimneys, the route the Ger
mans took from Aachen to Wise, one
comes TO a turn in the highway,
where, in place of the fine old six
teenth century house belonging TO
the de Borchgrave family, there
stands now only a mass of blackened
walls. And there, along the Mouse,
below one, lies a silent city; its
empty chambers open to the sky, 1t
might be Pompeii. Those ruins
might have lain there for centuries.
There is not a living being there. The
devastation, the destruction are abso-
lutte, the silence complete; it is the
very abomination of deSolation, a
mass of brick and stone and charred
beams, crumbling white facades,
whose windows, with their easements
blackened by fire, stare like the hol-
low sockets of skulls. OF the 1000
inhabitants, not one is there, not a
house is standing, not a roof re-
mains. The taverns where the peo-
pie used to go in joyous bands to eat
of the famous roast goose are heaps
of cinders; the very trees in their
gardens, under whose boughs the
youth of Liege used to dance the
cramignon, have been burned. The
scaling walls of the church tremble
in the wind, the roof has fallen in;
the towers, with their bells; the
organs, the statues, have tumbled
into bits. The work that would have
required ages was accomplished by
German organization in night.
And my lawyer friend who was
born there, when he saw it from the
turn in the road of the Three Chin
neys, and looked on the ruins lying
before him along the highway to the
Meuse, said:
Since there is nothing left with
which to begin life anew, let the city
be preserved as it is; holy necrop-
oils and a shrine; a monument to the
implacable ferocity of German kul-
tur."
The German troops entered St.
Remy-sous-Argentea on the fourth
of August at 10 o'clock in the morn
ing; they came in an endless stream
that rolled on like a tide to the
Meuse. Those first corners did no
harm to the civilians; it was not
until they had been checked by the
Belgian army that the civil popula-
ton had to suffer. They fell back,
and because Wise lay on the main
road running from Germany to the
Meuse, they put it to fire and sword;
and whole families, threatened with
shooting if they should leave their
houses, were burned alive in their
homes-men, women and children.
The old cure of the parish of st.
Remy, having buried a neighboring
priest, shot because the Belgian en-
Cineers had used the tower of his
church for observations. remarked to
a German officer that il was unjust;
that it was the military, and not the
priest. and that the priest had no
means of preventing them from do
ing so. And the officer replied:
Eyes, all that is true, but war is
war. and they did right to shoot the
priest"
All the old cure could do was to
go out of his parsonage and over the
fields alone in the darkness; he
could not see two PAGES ahead of
him. but to right and left he heard
cries of pain and the groans of dying
men. and there. alone on the field.
turning about. he made the sign OF
the cross many times. giving a gem
eraI dissolution to all those name
less ores who were dying there.