ict against us.

"If they do rise it will be Louvain all over again. We shall burn Liege
and kill all who are suspected of being in league against our troops.
Assuredly many innocent ones will suffer then with the guilty; but what
else can we do? We are living above a seething volcano."

Certainly, though, never did volcano seethe more quietly.

The garrison commander would not hear of our visiting any of the wrecked
Belgian fortresses on the wooded heights behind the city. As a reason
for his refusal he said that explosives in the buried magazines were
beginning to go off, making it highly dangerous for spectators to
venture near them. However, he had no objection to our going to a
certain specified point within the zone of supposed safety. With a
noncommissioned officer to guide us we climbed up a miry footpath to the
crest of a low hill; and from a distance of perhaps a hundred yards we
looked across at what was left of Fort Loncin, one of the principal
defenses.

I am wrong there. We did not look at what was left of Fort Loncin.
Literally nothing was left of it. As a fort it was gone, obliterated,
wiped out, vanished. It had been of a triangular shape. It was of no
shape now. We found it difficult to believe that the work of human
hands had wrought destruction so utter and overwhelming. Where masonry
walls had been was a vast junk heap; where stout magazines had been
bedded down in hard concrete was a crater; where strong barracks had
stood was a jumbled, shuffled nothingness.

Standing there on the shell-torn hilltop, looking across to where the
Krupp surprise wrote its own testimonials at its first time of using, in
characters so deadly and devastating, I found myself somehow thinking of
that foolish nursery tale wherein it is recited that a pig built himself
a house of straw, and the wolf came; and he huffed and he puffed and he
blew the house down. The noncommissioned officer told us an unknown
number of the defenders, running probably into the hundreds, had been
buried so deeply beneath the ruins of the fort in the last hours of the
fighting that the Germans had been unable to recover the bodies. Even
as he spoke a puff of wind brought to our nostrils a smell which, once a
man gets it into his nose, he will never get the memory of it out again
so long as he has a nose. Being sufficiently sick, we departed thence.

As we rode back, and had got as far as the two ruined villages, it began
to rai