On this day in 1914, the university library at Louvain burned. It was housed in the old cloth hall, a long room of the kind you enter and go quiet in: oak cases standing shoulder to shoulder against the walls, tall enough that the upper shelves needed a ladder, a high vaulted ceiling above them, tables down the middle where the light from the windows fell across the paper. Somewhere near the door, the catalogue: shallow drawers, hundreds of them, each card written out by hand by someone whose job it was to know where things were.

On the shelves were about three hundred thousand books, and among them roughly a thousand medieval manuscripts, copied letter by letter over centuries by people who ruled their lines first and left their small errors in the margins. All of it burned.

The next morning there was ash in the street, and paper still coming down in flakes, and along that street houses were open to the sky \u2014 more than eleven hundred of Louvain's nearly nine thousand homes destroyed. Two hundred and forty-eight people in the town were killed in those days. Fifteen hundred were taken away to Germany and held until January. The books are what the world remembers. The count of the dead is the part I want to say plainly.