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 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,