inst
continual importunity, a big Belgian dog, with a dragging tail and a
sharp jackal nose, loped round from behind an undamaged cow barn which
stood back of the riven shell of a house where the soldiers were
quartered. He had the air about him of looking for somebody or
something.

He stopped short, sniffing and whining, at sight of the gray coats
bunched in the doorway; and then, running back a few yards, with his
head all the time turned to watch the strangers, he sat on his haunches,
stuck his pointed muzzle upward toward the sky and fetched a long,
homesick howl from the bottom of his disconsolate canine soul. When we
turned a bend in the road, to enter the first recognizable street of
Liege, he was still hunkered down there in the rain. He finished the
picture; he keynoted it. The composition of it--for me--was perfect
now.

I mean no levity when I say that Liege was well shaken before taken; but
merely that the phrase is the apt one for use, because it better
expresses the truth than any other I can think of. Yet, considering
what it went through, last month, Liege seemed to have emerged in better
shape than one would have expected.

Driving into the town I saw more houses with white flags--the emblem of
complete surrender--fluttering from sill and coping, than houses bearing
marks of the siege. In the bombardment the shells mostly appeared to
have passed above the town--which was natural enough, seeing that the
principal Belgian forts stood on the hilltops westward of and
overlooking the city; and the principal German batteries--at least,
until the last day of fighting--were posted behind temporary defenses,
hastily thrown up, well to the east and north.

Liege, squatted in the natural amphitheater below, practically escaped
the fire of the big guns. The main concern of the noncombatants, they
tell me, was to shelter themselves from the street fighting, which, by
all accounts, was both stubborn and sanguinary. The doughty Walloons
who live in this corner of Belgium have had the name of being sincere
and willing workers with bare steel since the days when Charles the
Bold, of Burgundy, sought to curb their rebellious spirits by razing
their city walls and massacring some ten thousand of them. And quite a
spell before that, I believe, Julius Caesar found them tough to bend and
hard to break.

As for the Germans, checked as they had been in their rush on France by
a foe whom they had regarded as too