By the time we reached the roof of the hotel Belgian high-angle and machine-guns were stabbing the darkness with spurts of flame, the troops of the garrison were blazing away with rifles, and the gendarmes in the streets were shooting wildly with their revolvers:  the noise was deafening.  Oblivious of the consternation and confusion it had caused, the Zeppelin, after letting fall a final bomb, slowly rose and disappeared in the upper darkness.

The destruction wrought by the German projectiles was almost incredible.  The first shell, which I had seen fall, struck a building in the Rue de la Bourse, barely two hundred yards in a straight line from my window.  A hole was not merely blown through the roof, as would have been the case with a shell from a field-gun, but the three upper stories simply crumbled, disintegrated, came crashing down in an avalanche of brick and stone and plaster, as though a Titan had hit it with a sledge-hammer.  Another shell struck in the middle of the Poids Public, or public weighing-place, which is about the size of Russell Square in London.  It blew a hole in the cobblestone-pavement large enough to bury a horse in; one policeman on duty at the far end of the square was instantly killed and another had both legs blown off.  But this was not all nor nearly all.  Six people sleeping in houses fronting on the square were killed in their beds and a dozen others were more or less seriously wounded.  Every building facing on the square was either wholly or partially demolished, the steel splinters of the projectile tearing their way through the thick brick-walls as easily as a lead-pencil is jabbed through a sheet of paper.  And, as a result of the terrific concussion, every house within a hundred yards of the square in every direction had its windows broken.  On no battlefield have I ever seen so horrible a sight as that which turned me weak and nauseated when I entered one of the shattered houses and made my way, over heaps of fallen debris, to a room where a young woman had been sleeping.  She had literally been blown to fragments.  The floor, the walls, the ceiling, were splotched with—­well, it’s enough to say that that woman’s remains could only have been collected with a shovel.  In saying this, I am not speaking flippantly either.  I have dwelt upon these details, revolting as they are, because I wish to drive home the fact that the only victims of this air-raid on Antwerp were innocent non-combatants.

Another shell struck the roof of a physician’s house in the fashionable Rue des Escrimeurs, killing two maids who were sleeping in a room on the upper floor.  A shell fell in a garden in the Rue von Bary, terribly wounding a man and his wife.  A little child was mangled by a shell which struck a house in the Rue de la Justice.  Another shell fell in the barracks in the Rue Falcon, killing one inmate and wounding two others.  By a fortunate coincidence the regiment which had been quartered in the barracks had left for the front on the previous