The scenes along the Lierre-St. Catherine-Waelhem sector, against which the Germans at first focussed their attack, were impressive and awesome beyond description.  Against a livid sky rose pillars of smoke from burning villages.  The air was filled with shrieking shell and bursting shrapnel.  The deep-mouthed roar of the guns in the forts and the angry bark of the Belgian field-batteries were answered at intervals by the shattering crash of the German high-explosive shells.  When one of these big shells—­the soldiers dubbed them “Antwerp expresses”—­struck in a field it sent up a geyser of earth two hundred feet in height.  When they dropped in a river or canal, as sometimes happened, there was a waterspout.  And when they dropped in a village, that village disappeared from the map.

While we were watching the bombardment from a rise in the Waelhem road a shell burst in the hamlet of Waerloos, whose red-brick houses were clustered almost at our feet.  A few minutes later a procession of fugitive villagers came plodding up the cobble-paved highway.  It was headed by an ashen-faced peasant pushing a wheelbarrow with a weeping woman clinging to his arm.  In the wheelbarrow, atop a pile of hastily collected household goods, was sprawled the body of a little boy.  He could not have been more than seven.  His little knickerbockered legs and play-worn shoes protruded grotesquely from beneath a heap of bedding.  When they lifted it we could see where the shell had hit him.  Beside the dead boy sat his sister, a tot of three, with blood trickling from a flesh-wound in her face.  She was still clinging convulsively to a toy lamb which had once been white but whose fleece was now splotched with red.  Some one passed round a hat and we awkwardly tried to express our sympathy through the medium of silver.  After a little pause they started on again, the father stolidly pushing the wheelbarrow, with its pathetic load, before him.  It was the only home that family had.

One of the bravest acts that I have ever seen was performed by an American woman during the bombardment of Waelhem.  Her name was Mrs. Winterbottom; she was originally from Boston, and had married an English army officer.  When he went to the front in France she went to the front in Belgium, bringing over her car, which she drove herself, and placing it at the disposal of the British Field Hospital.  After the fort of Waelhem had been silenced and such of the garrison as were able to move had been withdrawn, word was received at ambulance headquarters that a number of dangerously wounded had been left behind and that they would die unless they received immediate attention.  To reach the fort it was necessary to traverse nearly two miles of road swept by shell-fire.  Before anyone realized what was happening a big grey car shot down the road with the slender figure of Mrs. Winterbottom at the wheel.  Clinging to the running-board was her English chauffeur and beside her sat my little Kansas photographer, Donald Thompson.