Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/139

 Place. He sat down on it, crossed his legs, and said: "It is our duty to burn the town!"

The inhabitants were allowed two hours to clear out. Then the soldiers went to work. Their apparatus is in the best tradition of German science—patented, for all I know, from Charlottenburg. It consists of a small portable pressure-caisson filled with benzine and fitted with a spray. Other witnesses said that there was also a great caisson on wheels. With this they sprinkled the doors, the ground storeys of the houses—as doorposts were once fatally sprinkled with blood in Egypt—and set fire to the buildings.

Others used a sort of phosphorus-paste with which they smeared the object to be destroyed. They completed the work by flinging hand-grenades and prepared fuses into the infant flames.

The selective power of this apparatus was remarkable. Remembering Louvain, and how the burning of the University had destroyed German prestige for a century, General Sommerfeld had evidently given directions that public monumental buildings were to be spared. Thus the Museum and the Hôtel de Ville both stand; but right between them his petroleurs picked out and destroyed a hotel as neatly as you pick a winkle out of a shell. Similarly they cut the avocat's house, of which I have spoken, out of their sea of destruction.

General Sommerfeld's soldiery stole, pillaged,