A regiment of hungry dogs came prowling up the street, and, remembering the antics of the past week, they looked at us as if speculating what new species of crazy human being we were.  To them the world of men must suddenly have gone quite insane, and if there had been an agitator among them he might well have asked his fellow-dogs why they had acknowledged a race of madmen as their masters.  Indeed, one could almost detect a sense of surprise that we didn’t use the photographic apparatus to commit some new outrage.  They stayed with us for a while, but at the sight of our cinema man turning the crank like a machine gun, they turned and ran wildly down the street.

Emptied bottles looted from winecellars were strung along the curbs.  To some Germans they had been more fatal than the Belgian bullets, for while one detachment of the German soldiers had been setting the city blazing with petrol from the petrol flasks, others had set their insides on fire with liquors from the wine flasks, and, rolling through the town in drunken orgy, they had fallen headlong into the canal.

There is a relevant item for those who seek further confirmation as to the reality of the atrocities in Belgium.  If men could get so drunken and uncontrolled as to commit atrocities on themselves (i.e., self-destruction), it is reasonable to infer that they could commit atrocities on others—­and they undoubtedly did.  The surprise lies not in the number of such crimes, but the fewness of them.

Three boys who had somehow managed to crawl across the bridge were prodding about in the canals with bamboo poles.

“What are you doing?” we inquired.

“Fishing,” they responded.

“What for?” we asked.

“Dead Germans,” they replied.

“What do you do with them—­bury them?”

“No!” they shouted derisively.  “We just strip them of what they’ve got and shove ’em back in.”

Their search for these hapless victims was not motivated by any sentimental reasons, but simply by their business interest as local dealers in helmets, buttons and other German mementos.

We took pictures of these young water-ghouls; a picture of the Hotel de Ville, the calcined walls standing like a shell, the inside a smoking mass of debris; then a picture of a Belgian mitrailleuse car, manned by a crowd of young and jaunty dare-devils.  It came swinging into the square, bringing a lot of bicycles from a German patrol which had just been mowed down outside the city.  After taking a shot at an aeroplane buzzing away at a tremendous distance overhead, they were off again on another scouting trip.

I got separated from my party and was making my way alone when a sharp “Hello!” ringing up the street, startled me.  I turned to see, not one of the photographers, but a fully-armed, though somewhat diminutive, soldier in Belgian uniform waving his hand at me.

“Hello!” he shouted; “are you an American?”