Liege.  For the most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value.  Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters.  To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered region.  In its downward course the Meuse flows out of the Liege trench to expand through what is termed the Dutch Flats.

Liege, at the outbreak of the war, was a place of great wealth and extreme poverty—­a Liege artisan considered himself in prosperity on $5 a week.  It was of the first strategic importance to Belgium.  Its situation was that of a natural fortress, barring the advance of a German army.

The defenses of Liege were hardly worth an enemy’s gunfire before 1890.  They had consisted of a single fort on the Meuse right bank, and the citadel crowning the heights of the old town.  But subsequently the Belgian Chamber voted the necessary sums for fortifying Liege and Namur on the latest principles.  From the plans submitted, the one finally decided upon was that of the famous Belgian military engineer Henri Alexis Brialmont.  His design was a circle of detached forts, already approved by German engineers as best securing a city within from bombardment.  With regard to Liege and Namur particularly, Brialmont held that his plan would make passages of the Meuse at those places impregnable to an enemy.

When the German army stood before Liege on this fourth day of August, in 1914, the circumference of the detached forts was thirty-one miles with about two or three miles between them, and at an average of five miles from the city.  Each fort was constructed on a new model to withstand the highest range and power of offensive artillery forecast in the last decade of the nineteenth century.  When completed they presented the form of an armored mushroom, thrust upward from a mound by subterranean machinery.  The elevation of the cupola in action disclosed no more of its surface than was necessary for the firing of the guns.  The mounds were turfed and so inconspicuous that in times of peace sheep grazed over them.  In Brialmont’s original plan each fort was to be connected by infantry trenches with sunken emplacements for light artillery, but this important part of his design was relegated to the dangerous hour of a threatening enemy.  This work was undertaken too late before the onsweep of the Germans.  Instead, Brialmont’s single weak detail in surrounding each fort with an infantry platform was tenaciously preserved long after its uselessness must have been apparent.  Thus Liege was made a ring fortress to distinguish it from the former latest pattern of earth ramparts and outworks.