across the fields and meadows were what looked at first glance like
enormous red-brown serpents but which proved, upon closer
inspection, to be trenches for infantry. The region to the south of
Antwerp is a network of canals, and on the bank of every canal
rose, as though by magic, parapets of sandbags. Charges of
dynamite were placed under every bridge and viaduct and tunnel.
Barricades of paving-stones and mattresses and sometimes farm
carts were built across the highways. At certain points wires were
stretched across the roads at the height of a man's head for the
purpose of preventing sudden dashes by armoured motor-cars. The
walls of such buildings as were left standing were loopholed
for musketry. Machine-guns and quick-firers were mounted
everywhere. At night the white beams of the searchlights swept this
zone of desolation and turned it into day. Now the pitiable thing
about it was that all this enormous destruction proved to have been
wrought for nothing, for the Germans, instead of throwing huge
masses of infantry against the forts, as it was anticipated that they
would do, and thus giving the entanglements and the mine-fields
and the machine-guns a chance to get in their work, methodically
pounded the forts to pieces with siege-guns stationed a dozen miles
away. In fact, when the Germans entered Antwerp not a strand of
barbed wire had been cut, not a barricade defended, not a mine
exploded. This, mind you, was not due to any lack of bravery on the
part of the Belgians--Heaven knows, they did not lack for that!--but
to the fact that the Germans never gave them a chance to make
use of these elaborate and ingenious devices. It was like a man
letting a child painstakingly construct an edifice of building-blocks
and then, when it was completed, suddenly sweeping it aside with
his hand.