puny to count as a factor in the
war, they sacrificed themselves by hundreds and thousands to win
breathing space behind standing walls until their great seventeen-inch
siege guns could be brought from Essen and mounted by the force of
engineers who came for that purpose direct from the Krupp works.

In that portion of the town lying west of the Meuse we counted perhaps
ten houses that were leveled flat and perhaps twenty that were now but
burnt-out, riddled hulls of houses, as empty and useless as so many
shucked pea-pods. Of the bridges spanning the river, the principal one,
a handsome four-span structure of stone ornamented with stone figures of
river gods, lay now in shattered fragments, choking the current, where
the Belgians themselves had blown it apart. One more bridge, or perhaps
two--I cannot be sure--were closed to traffic because dynamite had made
them unsafe; but the remaining bridges, of which I think there were
three, showed no signs of rough treatment. Opposite the great
University there was a big, black, ragged scar to show where a block of
dwellings had stood.

Liege, to judge from its surface aspect, could not well have been
quieter. Business went on; buyers and sellers filled the side streets
and dotted the long stone quays. Old Flemish men fished industriously
below the wrecked stone bridge, where the debris made new eddies in the
swift, narrow stream; and blue pigeons swarmed in the plaza before the
Palais de Justice, giving to the scene a suggestion of St. Mark's Square
at Venice.

The German Landwehr, who were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants
civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against
the Germans. But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble
was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us. We talked
with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been
a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper. He received us beneath the
portico of the Theatre Royale, built after the model of the Odeon in
Paris. Two waspish rapid-fire guns stood just within the shelter of the
columns, with their black snouts pointing this way and that to command
the sweep of the three-cornered Place du Theatre. A company of soldiers
was quartered in the theater itself. At night, so the lieutenant said,
those men who were off duty rummaged the costumes out of the dressing
rooms, put them on, and gave mock plays, with music. An officer's