Darkness had now fallen.  A torrential rain had set in.  The car slid from one side of the road to the other like a Scotchman coming home from celebrating Bobbie Burns’s birthday and repeatedly threatened to capsize in the ditch.  The mud was ankle-deep and the road back to Malines was now in the possession of the Germans, so we were compelled to make a detour through a deserted country-side, running through the inky blackness without lights so as not to invite a visit from a shell.  It was long after midnight when, cold, wet and famished, we called the password to the sentry at the gateway through the barbed-wire entanglements which encircled Antwerp and he let us in.  It was a very lively day for every one concerned and there were a few minutes when I thought that I would never see the Statue of Liberty again.

VII.  The Coming Of The British

Imagine, if you please, a professional heavy-weight prize-fighter, with an abnormally long reach, holding an amateur bantam-weight boxer at arm’s length with one hand and hitting him when and where he pleased with the other.  The fact that the little man was not in the least afraid of his burly antagonist and that he got in a vicious kick or jab whenever he saw an opening would not, of course, have any effect on the outcome of the unequal contest.  Now that is almost precisely what happened when the Germans besieged Antwerp, the enormously superior range and calibre of their siege-guns enabling them to pound the city’s defences to pieces at their leisure without the defenders being able to offer any effective resistance.

Though Antwerp was to all intents and purposes a besieged city for many weeks prior to its capture, it was not until the beginning of the last week in September that the Germans seriously set to work of destroying its fortifications.  When they did begin, however, their great siege pieces pounded the forts as steadily and remorselessly as a trip-hammer pounds a bar of iron.  At the time the Belgian General Staff believed that the Germans were using the same giant howitzers which demolished the forts at Liege, but in this they were mistaken, for, as it transpired later, the Antwerp fortifications owed their destruction to Austrian guns served by Austrian artillerymen.  Now guns of this size can only be fired from specially prepared concrete beds, and these beds, as we afterwards learned, had been built during the preceding month behind the embankment of the railway which runs from Malines to Louvain, thus accounting for the tenacity with which the Germans had held this railway despite repeated attempts to dislodge them.  At this stage of the investment the Germans were firing at a range of upwards of eight miles, while the Belgians had no artillery that was effective at more than six.  Add to this the fact that the German fire was remarkably accurate, being controlled and constantly corrected by observers stationed in balloons, and that the German shells were loaded with an explosive having greater destructive properties than either cordite or shimose powder, and it will be seen how hopeless was the Belgian position.