A Higher Form of Killing by Diana Preston Page A

lined up hostages—men, women, and children—in the town square and executed them by firing squad. The dead exceeded six hundred.
    The most well-publicized atrocity was at Louvain in Belgium. After German troops had occupied the city, the Belgian army launched a counterattack on August 25. The German soldiers panicked and over the next five days burned down much of the city including its world-famous ancient library with its 230,000 precious volumes, killed more than two hundred civilians, and ejected the remaining forty-two thousand inhabitants by force including sixteen hundred men, women, and children they deported to Germany. A German officer told an American diplomat who visited Louvain on August 28: “We shall wipe [Louvain] out, not one stone will stand upon another! Not one, I tell you. We will teach them to respect Germans. For generations people will come here to see what we have done!”
    Such actions were of course in direct breach of the laws of war agreed to internationally at The Hague. British prime minister Herbert Asquith claimed it was “the greatest crime against civilisation and culture since the Thirty Years War—the sack of Louvain . . . a shameless holocaust . . . lit up by blind barbarian vengeance.” Many in Britain called for an announcement that when the war was won the kaiser would be exiled to Saint Helena as Napoleon had been after his defeat at Waterloo. Others called for those responsible to be tried as war criminals. The dean of Peterborough Cathedral in England encapsulated this view: “We may be far still from the final abolition of war, but we should not be far from the end of atrocities in war if those responsible for them in whatever rank had the risk before their eyes that they might have to suffer just penalties as ‘common felons.’ ”
    Unwilling for their nation to be seen as book burners and murderers, ninety-three German academics, scientists, and intellectuals, including the Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Röntgen and future winner Max Planck, as well as the composer Engelbert Humperdinck and the theater director Max Reinhardt, signed a “Proclamation to the Civilised World” protesting Germany’s right to have carried out reprisals and claiming that “if it had not been for German soldiers, German culture would long have been swept away.”
    The most likely source of friction between the Allies and the United States and other neutrals early in the war was action by the British navy to enforce a blockade against goods being shipped to Germany. On August 6 the U.S. government asked all belligerents to commit themselves to following the rules laid down for the conduct of maritime warfare in the Declaration of London which—though not ratified by either the United States or the United Kingdom—represented in their view the consensus of world opinion. In line with Grey’s wish to do all that he could to preserve friendly relations with the United States, Britain responded on behalf of the Allies with a note that seemed on the surface an affirmative until, in what could be construed as “small print,” it reserved rights “essential to the conduct of naval operations.”
    On the second day of the war, August 5, the German navy sent out a requisitioned excursion steamer, the Königin Luise , crudely disguised as a British North Sea ferry. In direct contravention of the agreement at the Second Hague Conference which prohibited the use of unattached mines that would not become harmless after being in the sea for an hour, she began laying her cargo of 180 mines in the North Sea. HMS Amphion , a British light cruiser, caught up with and sank her but as she was returning to port hit one of the floating mines the Königin Luise had laid and herself sank with considerable loss of life including most of the survivors she had picked up from the Königin Luise .
    In the years immediately before the war German engineers had achieved a breakthrough in submarine design.