My last look at a Belgian bread-line was at Liege, that town which had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost forgotten.  An industrial town, its mines and works were idle.  The Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that for making guns and shells.  If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly became butter-fingered.  So that bread-line at Liege was long, its queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.

As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen—­ there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches—­it was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer of Hussars.  He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent.  While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass the aide chatted of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne.  The British fought like devils, he said.  It was a question if their new army would be so good.  He showed me a photograph of himself in a British Tommy’s overcoat.

“When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,” he explained.  “I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his.  It fitted me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made to show my friends.”

Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.

“You don’t understand,” he said.  “That Tommy had to give me his coat!  He was a prisoner.”

On my way out from Liege I was to see Vise—­the town of the gateway—­the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness.  I had thought of it as entirely destroyed.  A part of it had survived.

A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side.  His examination was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be friendly.  You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around the corner and have “ein Glas Bier” rather than search me.  What a hearty “Auf wiedersehen!” he gave me when he saw that I was inclined to be friendly, too!

I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their ravenously whispered “When?” When would the Allies come?

The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the Ypres salient, two months later.  When should I be next in Brussels?  With a victorious British army, I hoped.  A long wait it was to be for a conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the sound of gun-fire was nearer.