for the
purpose of preventing sudden dashes by armoured motor-cars. The
walls of such buildings as were left standing were loopholed
for musketry. Machine-guns and quick-firers were mounted
everywhere. At night the white beams of the searchlights swept this
zone of desolation and turned it into day. Now the pitiable thing
about it was that all this enormous destruction proved to have been
wrought for nothing, for the Germans, instead of throwing huge
masses of infantry against the forts, as it was anticipated that they
would do, and thus giving the entanglements and the mine-fields
and the machine-guns a chance to get in their work, methodically
pounded the forts to pieces with siege-guns stationed a dozen miles
away. In fact, when the Germans entered Antwerp not a strand of
barbed wire had been cut, not a barricade defended, not a mine
exploded. This, mind you, was not due to any lack of bravery on the
part of the Belgians--Heaven knows, they did not lack for that!--but
to the fact that the Germans never gave them a chance to make
use of these elaborate and ingenious devices. It was like a man
letting a child painstakingly construct an edifice of building-blocks
and then, when it was completed, suddenly sweeping it aside with
his hand.

As a result of these elaborate precautions, it was as difficult to go
in or out of Antwerp as it is popularly supposed to be for a millionaire
to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Sentries were as thick as policemen
in Piccadilly. You could not proceed a quarter of a mile along any
road, in any direction, without being halted by a harsh "Qui vive?"
and having the business end of a rifle turned in your direction. If
your papers were not in order you were promptly turned back--or
arrested as a suspicious character and taken before an officer for
examination--though if you were sufficiently in the confidence of the
military authorities to be given the password, you were usually
permitted to pass without further question. It was some time before
I lost the thrill of novelty and excitement produced by this
halt-who-goes-there-advance-friend-and-give-the-countersign business.
It was so exactly the sort of thing that, as a boy, I used to read
about in books by George A. Henty that it seemed improbable and unreal.
When we were motoring at night and a peremptory challenge would
come from out the darkness and the lamps of the car would pick out
the cloaked figure of the sentry as the spotlight picks