sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow, had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden ribs showing below.  The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted.  One house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken windows and fissures in the roof—­as though the whizzing shells had spared it deliberately.

I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of front wall between the places where windows had been.  It rose in a ragged column to the line of the roof-rafters—­only, of course, there was neither roof nor rafter now.  On the face of the column, as though done in a spirit of bitter irony, was posted a proclamation, signed by the burgomaster and the military commandant, calling on the vanished dwellers of this place to preserve their tranquillity.

On the side of the fort away from the city, and in the direction whence we had come, a corporal’s guard had established itself in a rent-asunder house in order to be out of the wet.  On the front of the house they had hung a captured Belgian bugler’s uniform and a French dragoon’s overcoat, which latter garment was probably a trophy brought back from the lower lines of fighting; it made you think of an old-clothes-man’s shop.  The corporal came forth to look at our passes before permitting us to go on.  He was a dumpy, good-natured-looking Hanoverian with patchy saffron whiskers sprouting out on him.

“Ach! yes,” he said in answer to my conductor’s question.  “Things are quiet enough here now; but on Monday”—­that would be three days before—­ “we shot sixteen men here—­rioters and civilians who fired on our troops, and one grave-robber—­a dirty hound!  They are yonder.”

He swung his arm; and following its swing we saw a mound of fresh-turned clay, perhaps twenty feet in length, which made a yellow streak against the green of a small inclosed pasture about a hundred yards away.  We saw many such mounds that day; and this one where the ignoble sixteen lay was the shortest of the lot.  Some mounds were fifty or sixty feet in length.  I presume there were distinguishing marks on the filled-up trenches where the German dead lay, but from the automobile we could make out none.

As we started on again, after giving the little Hanoverian the last treasured copy of a paper we had managed to keep that long against continual importunity, a big Belgian dog, with a dragging tail and a sharp jackal nose, loped round from behind an undamaged cow barn which stood back of the riven shell of a house where the soldiers were quartered.  He had the air about him of looking for somebody or something.

He stopped short, sniffing and whining, at sight of the gray coats bunched in the doorway; and then, running back a few yards, with his head all the time turned to watch the strangers, he sat on his haunches, stuck his pointed muzzle upward toward the sky and fetched a long, homesick howl from the bottom of his disconsolate canine soul.  When we turned a bend in the road, to enter the first recognizable street of Liege, he was still hunkered down there in the rain.  He finished the picture; he keynoted it.  The composition of it—­for me—­was perfect now.