ng of the
last week in September that the Germans seriously set to work of
destroying its fortifications. When they did begin, however, their
great siege pieces pounded the forts as steadily and remorselessly
as a trip-hammer pounds a bar of iron. At the time the Belgian
General Staff believed that the Germans were using the same giant
howitzers which demolished the forts at Liege, but in this they were
mistaken, for, as it transpired later, the Antwerp fortifications owed
their destruction to Austrian guns served by Austrian artillerymen.
Now guns of this size can only be fired from specially prepared
concrete beds, and these beds, as we afterwards learned, had been
built during the preceding month behind the embankment of the
railway which runs from Malines to Louvain, thus accounting for the
tenacity with which the Germans had held this railway despite
repeated attempts to dislodge them. At this stage of the investment
the Germans were firing at a range of upwards of eight miles, while
the Belgians had no artillery that was effective at more than six. Add
to this the fact that the German fire was remarkably accurate, being
controlled and constantly corrected by observers stationed in
balloons, and that the German shells were loaded with an explosive
having greater destructive properties than either cordite or shimose
powder, and it will be seen how hopeless was the Belgian position.

The scenes along the Lierre-St. Catherine-Waelhem sector, against
which the Germans at first focussed their attack, were impressive
and awesome beyond description. Against a livid sky rose pillars of
smoke from burning villages. The air was filled with shrieking shell
and bursting shrapnel. The deep-mouthed roar of the guns in the
forts and the angry bark of the Belgian field-batteries were answered
at intervals by the shattering crash of the German high-explosive
shells. When one of these big shells--the soldiers dubbed them
"Antwerp expresses"--struck in a field it sent up a geyser of earth
two hundred feet in height. When they dropped in a river or canal,
as sometimes happened, there was a waterspout. And when they
dropped in a village, that village disappeared from the map.

While we were watching the bombardment from a rise in the
Waelhem road a shell burst in the hamlet of Waerloos, whose red-
brick houses were clustered almost at our feet. A few minutes later
a procession of fugitive villagers came plodding up the cobble-
paved