About one hundred houses were chalked in the way I have
described. All these were unscathed by the fire, though they stood in
streets otherwise devastated. The remaining three hundred houses had the
good luck to stand at the outskirts and on streets unvisited by the
house-to-house incendiaries.
Four days after my first visit the Germans burned again the already
wrecked town, turning their attention to the neglected three hundred
houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter the town, and that was
on the Wednesday after.
As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and
William R. Renton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the chalked houses.
"Build a fence around Termonde," suggested a Ghent manufacturer, "leave
the ruins untouched. Let the place stand there, with its burned houses,
churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show the world what German
culture is. It will be a monument to their methods of conducting war.
There will be no need of saying anything. That is all the proof we need.
Then throw open the place to visitors from all the world, as soon as
this war is over. Let them draw their own conclusions."
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
In Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw a little peasant girl
dying from the bayonet wounds in her back which the German soldiers had
given her.
Cain slew only a brother,
A lad who was fair and strong,
His murder was careless and honest,
A heated and sudden wrong.
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