BELGIUM: Furore

“DESTROYED BY TEUTONIC FURY; RESTORED BY AMERICAN GIFTS” is the way in which most people would translate the Latin sentence, “Furore Teutonico Diruta; Dono Americano Restituta.”

The sentence was chosen by Belgium’s hero Cardinal, the late Desire Mercier, to serve as an inscription across the facade of the rebuilt Library of Louvain. To gentle yet righteously incensed Desire Mercier “furore” seemed none too harsh a word to apply to Huns; but nowadays there is a milksop movement afoot to emasculate the Louvain inscription until it could not possibly give offense to those jovial, harmless fellows the Germans, who sacked and burned the original Library of Louvain.

No milksop is bristling, ruddy, white-haired Whitney Warren, smart and picturesque Manhattan architect, who designed the new Library, and received from Cardinal Mercier the virile Latin inscription. Last week Mr. Warren was in Belgium bristling against the would-be emasculators.”The nigger in the woodpile,” said he scathingly, “has evidently been my dear friend, Nicholas Murray Butler, President of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. . . . The people of Belgium want the inscription and I might add, a very large majority of the American contributors do also. … In America the lives of so-called free American citizens are made unbearable by those two pests—the professional pacifists and the professional prohibitionists. . . . The only thing I desire is to be allowed to finish my work and hand over the keys to the university. Then the authorities can do as they please—in fact tear down the whole thing if they so desire.”

Having thus lightninged and thundered, Architect Warren ended his declaration with a statement mild as milk. He declared that the official translation of the inscription is “DESTROYED BY TEUTONIC FOLLY; RESTORED BY AN AMERICAN GIFT.” He added that Monsignor Ladeuze, Rector of the University of Louvain has finally ruled that the epithet “furore” shall stand. When curious persons turned to Latin dictionaries, last week, to see if “juror” could be stretched to mean “folly.” they found as authorized synonyms “delusion,” “frenzy,” “madness,” “rage” and “fury.” Nobody’s Latin except Architect Warren’s could make “furor” mean “folly,” as distinct from insanity.

What “furor” meant to Desiré Mercier was discreetly hinted by foxy Architect Warren, who revealed that the Cardinal said, two months before his death: “When the Germans come back [to Louvain] as they will and as they have through the past centuries, when they read this inscription countersigned by America perhaps they may behave themselves more decently than they did the last time.”

Belgians had a second chance to cry “milksop!” last week, when famed Art Patron Otto Kahn resigned as a member of Manhattan’s unofficial Advisory Film Committee because it had sponsored the showing of the British cinema drama Dawn (TIME, March 12, 19), which depicts the shooting of Nurse Cavell in Belgium with realistic Teutonico furore. When the film was shown at Brussels it was received with tranquil approval. In England the Baldwin Cabinet made every effort to have Dawn suppressed; but it was finally approved by the London municipal authorities and shown, after emasculating cuts, without untoward incident.