There are many other rules of logical warfare, such as ignoring treaties, engagements, and, indeed, the truth in any form.  But these are those with which I myself came in contact, and which therefore interested me the most.  There is only one unfortunate objection to logical warfare, and that is that it is the duty of the whole civilized world, as it values its eternal salvation, to blot out from the face of the earth they have defiled the nation which practises it.

I do not wish to be unfair to those with whom we are fighting, or to arouse against them an unjust resentment.  I am merely attempting to express succinctly the doctrines which have been proclaimed throughout Germany for years, of which this war is the logical outcome, and in the light of which alone its incidents can be understood.  She is the home of logic, the temple where material progress is worshipped as a god.  For her there is no meaning in those dim yearnings of the human mind, in which logic has no part, since their foundations are hidden in depths beneath our ken, but which alone separate us from the beasts that perish.  And, above all things, I would not be thought to include in such a sweeping statement all those who call themselves German.  There are many in Germany who are not of this Germany, and in the end it may be for them as much as for ourselves that we shall have fought this war.

It is only when viewed in this setting that a scene such as that we saw at Lierre can be understood.  By itself it would stand naked, meaningless, and merely horrible.  Clothed in these thoughts, it is pregnant with meaning, and forms a real epitome of the whole German conception of war; for horror is their dearest ally, and that scene has left on my mind a feeling of horror which I do not think that time will ever eradicate.

Lierre is an old-world town on the River Nethe, nine miles south of Antwerp, prosperous, and thoroughly Flemish.  Its 20,000 inhabitants weave silk and brew beer, as they did when London was a village.  Without the physical advantages of Antwerp, and without the turbulence of Ghent, Lierre has escaped their strange vicissitudes, and for hundreds of years has enjoyed the prosperity of a quiet and industrious town.  Its church of St. Gommarius is renowned for its magnificent proportions, its superb window tracery, and its wonderful rood-loft—­features in which it has eclipsed in glory even the great cathedrals of Belgium, and which place it alone as a unique achievement of the art of the fifteenth century.  It is in no sense a military town, and has no defences, though there is a fort of the same name at no great distance from it.