On August 1, 1914, no city in all Europe could boast of more beautiful suburbs than Antwerp.  Hidden amid the foliage of great wooded parks were stately chateaux; splendid country-houses rose from amid acres of green plush lawns and blazing gardens; the network of roads and avenues and bridle-paths were lined with venerable trees, whose branches, meeting overhead, formed leafy tunnels; scattered here and there were quaint old-world villages, 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 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