with plaster walls and pottery roofs and lichen-covered church
spires. By the last day of August all this had disappeared. The
loveliest suburbs in Europe had been wiped from the earth as a
sponge wipes figures from a slate. Every house and church and
windmill, every tree and hedge and wall, in a zone some two or
three miles wide by twenty long, was literally levelled to the ground.
For mile after mile the splendid trees which lined the highroads were
ruthlessly cut down; mansions which could fittingly have housed a
king were dynamited; churches whose walls had echoed to the
tramp of the Duke of Alba's mail-clad men-at-arms were levelled;
villages whose picturesqueness was the joy of artists and travellers
were given over to the flames. Certainly not since the burning of
Moscow has there been witnessed such a scene of self-inflicted
desolation. When the work of the engineers was finished a jack-rabbit
could not have approached the forts without being seen. When the
work of levelling had been completed, acres upon acres of
barbed-wire entanglements were constructed, the wires being
grounded and connected with the city lighting system so that a
voltage could instantly be turned on which would prove as deadly as
the electric chair at Sing Sing. Thousands of men were set to work
sharpening stakes and driving these stakes, point upward, in the
ground, so as to impale any soldiers who fell upon them. In front of
the stakes were "man-traps," thousands of barrels with their heads
knocked out being set in the ground and then covered with a thin
layer of laths and earth, which would suddenly give way if a man
walked upon it and drop him into the hole below. And beyond the
zones of entanglements and chevaux de frise and man-traps the
beet and potato-fields were sown with mines which were to be
exploded by electricity when the enemy was fairly over them, and
blow that enemy, whole regiments at a time, into eternity. Stretching