life, and she showed that valor, being of the soul, bears no relation to bodily size.

At Liège she checked the onslaught of the Germans, who were at first surprised by her foolhardiness, and then infuriated. They quickly threw off the restraints of civilized warfare, in which they were never at ease, and proved themselves in acts the Huns they were at heart, if not by descent. Repulsed again and again from the forts of Liège, they had to wait until the mass of their troops came up, regiment after regiment, like the successive waves of a rising flood, with their monster siege-guns, the latest achievement of Krupp Kultur, before they could swamp the Belgian defenders and pass on their way westward.

Glorious Liège! Her name will shine beside that of Thermopyla. Thrice fortunate the heroes who died there defending their homes, their country's honor, and civilization itself! As long as time shall be, their example shall hearten brave men to fight for liberty against desperate odds; and when this titanic struggle

between the armies of Might and the armies of Right has closed, and the free nations of the world look back upon it, they will overflow with gratitude for Liège. Six or seven days are but a moment in a man's lifetime; and yet the six or seven days during which Liège blocked the onrush of the German hordes, outweigh in fatefulness many a century in the lifetime of civilization. They saved France; with France, they saved the cause of the Allies. That check shattered the military plan which Germany had been elaborating for forty years, the plan in which every minute detail was worked out, everything mechanical was provided for and under control. One thing alone had Krupp Kultur overlooked; it had assumed that the Belgians like the Germans were machines, not souls; but that small, brave company of Belgian souls at Liège rose up and dashed against and dislocated the gigantic German machine, and wrecked the mechanically perfect plan of Krupp Kultur. The Germans never entered

Paris. On the contrary, they were driven back from the Marne to the Aisne, and they would have retreated to the Rhine, if the French munitions had not given out. The heroes of Liège had not died in vain.

Enraged by the resistance, perhaps stung by the loathing with which the civilized world greeted their declaration that their most solemn promise was only a scrap of paper, the Germans proceeded to wreak on innocent Belgium their system of Frightfulness. The horrors they committed in those weeks of August and September cannot be put into words. To whatever town they came, though it were unfortified and undefended, they came as Huns into whose ruthless hands modern science had put tools of destruction unknown to their ancestors. Attila's barbarians spread fire from house to house by the torch; the barbarians of William II carried incendiary pastilles, which they threw into rooms, and engines filled with petroleum which they sprayed on the condemned buildings. Here they

battered down by cannonade; there they blew up by dynamite. In the country, they demolished the tiny villages, where only old men and women and children lingered. And they did not spare even the solitary peasant's cottage. They looted first and then they laid waste. In the cities of Flanders and Brabant they made the masterpieces of the famous architects who built in a golden age their special butt, as if the mere sight of Beauty maddened them.

But it was upon living, human beings that German Frightfulness, formulated by the General Staff and sanctioned by Emperor William, vented itself without mercy. Scarcely a place escaped horror in one or many forms. Unarmed men, burgomasters and local notables, quiet shopkeepers, workmen and servants, were seized, maltreated, killed, some without warning, others after prolonged suspense, and the refinement of cruelty.

We read that the Kaiser's minions took a

father and son into a garden, shot the son, compelled the father to stand at the feet of the corpse, and then shot him. They compelled wives to look on while their husbands were shot, before subjecting the women to outrage worse than death. They had no pity for children. In a single house they dispatched a little girl and her two smaller brothers; and, as if they were Herod's hirelings, they slaughtered even infants, skewering some on their bayonets, ripping or slashing others with their swords. Where they did not kill, they mutilated. They resorted to the savage practice of taking hostages, whom they slew if any irresponsible inhabitant was unruly or committed a violent act or was suspected of sniping. Often they did not wait for a pretext; but sometimes, as at Louvain, their soldiers fired into the streets from the natives' windows, and then, with the cry that the Louvainers were sniping the Germans, they redoubled their orgy of rape and pillage, and arson and murder. Sometimes they led