‘I remember the sound of their boots marching past’

This weekend I met the sole living survivor of the most notorious war crime committed by the German army as it marched through Belgium in August 1914.

Aged 103, elegant in a rose pink silk suit with matching scarf, her mind sharp, Marie Legrand has fleeting memories of the five terrible days in Louvain when German soldiers shot people dead on the streets and set the town ablaze.

“I remember the sound of their boots marching past,” she says. “They didn’t know there was a whole society of children hidden underground.”

Her father would hold his finger sternly to his lips and tell the children to be silent.

“He said if you don’t obey, the Germans will kill you, so we obeyed.”

Suddenly another memory comes into her mind.

“I remember the smell of smoke – it was everywhere,” she says. “That was the smell of Louvain.”

Wandering round the placid town – now usually known as Leuven because Flemish inhabitants outnumber francophone Walloons – I found it hard to imagine the terror of August 1914.

A hundred years is a long time. Two thousand buildings were destroyed, 248 people killed and the entire population of 10,000 forced to flee.

The great library, containing 300,000 medieval manuscripts, was burnt to the ground. In the nearby villlage of Dinant German forces lined the citizens up and shot them, killing more than 600.

On a sunny August afternoon now the central square is full of tourists eating ice-cream at outdoor cafes. But the lessons of Louvain are as relevant as ever.

The rampage through the town was triggered by an incident in which several German soldiers were killed – they blamed Belgian resistance although it was probably friendly fire.

They justified their atrocities in Louvain and six other nearby towns and villages by saying they were combatting “francs-tireurs” – “free shooters”, named after French guerrilla fighters in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.

In fact there were very few resistance fighters.

“The Germans had a terrible cruelty,” says Marie Legrand. “They said they were defending themselves against “francs-tireurs” but it wasn’t true. It was just families.”

German commanders allowed the soldiers to steal wine and beer from the town’s cellars so many were roaring drunk as they lurched through the cobbled streets, looting and killing.

The atrocities were not an accident but part of a strategy outlined by the 19th Century Prussian military theorist Clausewitz who believed that making the civilian population suffer would put pressure on their leaders to surrender.

In her classic account of the first month on WW1, “The Guns of August”, Barbara Tuchman writes: “The Germans burned Louvain not as a punishment for alleged Belgian misdeeds, but as a deterrent and as a warning to all their enemies – a gesture of German might before the world.”

Conjuring up that terror I found myself thinking of wars that I have reported: Congo, where red-eyed drunken soldiers rape women at will because there is no-one to stop or punish them.

Syria, where government-sponsored militia known as “shabiha” terrorise the population, so they will turn against rebels trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar al Assad.

Gaza, where the Israelis mete out collective punishment against civilians in the hope that people will blame Hamas. The logic behind cruelty has not changed.

Today’s wars feel like endless cycles of violence and vengeance – in Iraq, Syria, Israel and Palestine it’s hard to imagine the shape of peace, as each atrocity pushes   hope further away.

Europe endured another war before Germany’s ambitions were curtailed, and the countries settled down, first into an uneasy and then a real peace.

Prosperity saved Belgium, backed up by the institutions, including the EU, that were established after WW11 to stop the continent from going to war again.

I asked Marie if she still feared the Germans or nurtured any feelings of hatred.

“It’s waste of time. Close the page. Forget it. Do something else in a different atmosphere,” she replied. “If you carry hatred and vengeance with you, then you’ll never have peace.”

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