“Stop!  No further passage here.  You must turn back.”

“Why?” we asked protestingly.

“The entire road is being mined,” he replied.

Even as he spoke we could see a liquid explosive being poured into a sort of cup, and electric wires connected.  The officer pictured to us a regiment of soldiers advancing, with the full tide of life running in their veins, laughing and singing as they marched in the smiling sun.  Suddenly the road rocks and hell heaves up beneath their feet; bodies are blown into the air and rained back to the earth in tiny fragments of human flesh; while brains are spattered over the ground, and every crevice runs a rivulet of blood.  He sketched this in excellent English, adding: 

“A magnificent climax for Christian civilzation, eh!  And that’s my business.  But what else can one do?”

For the task of setting this colossal stage for death, the entire peasant population had been mobilized to assist the soldiers.  In self-defense Belgium was thus obliged to drive the dagger deep into her own bosom.  It seemed indeed as if she suffered as much at her own hands, as at the hands of the enemy.  To arrest the advancing scourge she impressed into her service dynamite, fire and flood.  I saw the sluice-gates lifted and meadows which had been waving with the golden grain of autumn now turned into silver lakes.  So suddenly had the waters covered the land that hay-cocks bobbed upon the top of the flood, and peasants went out in boats to dredge for the beets and turnips which lay beneath the waters.

The roads were inundated and so we ran along an embankment which, like a levee, lifted itself above the water wastes.  The sun, sinking down behind the flaming poplars in the west, was touching the rippling surface into myriad colors.  It was like a trip through Fairyland, or it would have been, were not men on all sides busy preparing for the bloody shambles.

After these elaborate defensive works the Belgians laughed at any one taking Antwerp, the impregnable fortress of Western Europe.  The Germans laughed, too.  But it was the bass, hollow laugh of their great guns placed ten to twenty miles away, and pouring into the city such a hurricane of shell and shrapnel that they forced its evacuation by the British and the Belgians.  Through this vast array of works which the reception committee had designed for their slaughter, the Germans came marching in as if on dress parade.

A few shells were even now crashing through Malines and had played havoc with the carillon in the cathedral tower.  During a lull in the bombardment we climbed a stairway of the belfry where, above us, balanced great stones which a slight jar would send tumbling down.  On and up we passed vents and jagged holes which had been ripped through these massive walls as if they were made of paper.  It was enough to carry the weight of one’s somber reflections without the addition of cheerful queries of the movie-man as to “how would you feel if the German gunners suddenly turned loose again?”