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 whole scene of the forts of Brialmont, with death lying couched in its guns.

Of Malines little of the material fabric of the town has suffered, with the exception of the cathedral. Through about twenty other houses shells had torn gashes as erratic as those which apparently a bullet tears through living tissue. But most of the streets remain unchanged. This statement is not, perhaps, as reassuring as it sounds. It is as if you were to say, in speaking of an attack on Oxford, that only the colleges had suffered. Malines is not only a cathedral city; the cathedral, situated geographically at its heart, dominates its whole economy. It is the spiritual centre of Belgium. The Cardinal Archbishop's palace, unpretentious between its thick trees and its quiet canal, is in some sense the moral capital of this valorous people.

Like Louvain, Malines got its bread largely by education. Its manufacturing industries, so to say, radiated from the cathedral. It printed missals and breviaries. It made lace for ecclesiastical vestments, and then other lace. It cut and carved heavy oak into furniture for churches, and then it made other furniture. Every shell launched against the cathedral was therefore launched against the very being and essence of Malines city.

I am not ashamed to confess that when I, an Irish Catholic, walked into the Grand' Place and