Meanwhile, however, the fort of Fléron[195] had been silenced. A shell had burst on the turret, and had smashed the machinery of the cupola. A furious bombardment was also kept up on Fort Chaudfontaine,[196] at the point where the railway line from Aix-la-Chapelle passes through a tunnel. The German artillery fire reduced the fort to a heap of ruins, but it never surrendered. Its heroic commander blocked the tunnel by causing railway engines to collide within it, and then, in order that the German flag should never fly over even the broken remains of his fort, he set fire to his ammunition magazine, and thus completed its destruction. The fall of Chaudfontaine opened up the railway to the invaders.
Long ago Julius Cæsar wrote, "Bravest of all peoples are the Belgæ." One who knows the Belgian soldier well says: "Greater even than my admiration of his careless courage is my liking for the man. For all his manhood, he has much of the child in him; he is such a chatterbox, and so full of laughter; and never are his laugh and his chaff so quick as when he has the sternest work in hand. Unshaven, mud-bespattered, hungry, so tired that he can hardly walk or lift his rifle to his shoulder, he will bear himself with a gallant gaiety which I think is quite his own, and altogether fascinating." No doubt in the eyes of the Germans the Belgian soldiers, almost untrained, clothed in a quaint jumble of curious uniforms, slovenly in appearance, and without any of the smartness of the drill-ground, appeared absurd; but they were patriots, every man of them, fighting freely, and indeed gladly, for all that they held dear.
During the fighting which I have just described, a lad of nineteen actually managed to capture a German general single-handed. When the general surrendered, his captor found that he was carrying a satchel containing not only papers but six thousand pounds in notes and gold. The young Belgian handed over the money to the Red Cross Society, to aid it in its splendid work of tending the wounded. He kept for himself, however, the satchel and the general's silver helmet.
While the forts were being bombarded, an examination was going on at the university. Most of the candidates finished their papers, and then trooped from the hall to the battlefield, where many of them lay dead a few hours later.
During that day and the next the Germans tried to "rush" the forts by hurling dense masses of men against them. Let me tell you the story of one of these attacks, from the lips of a Belgian officer.
"As line after line of the German infantry advanced we simply mowed them down. It was terribly easy, monsieur, and I turned to a brother officer of mine more than once and said, 'Voilà![197] they are coming on again, in a dense, close formation. They must be mad!' They made no attempt at deploying, but came on, line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until, as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped one on top of the other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded men that threatened to mask our guns and cause us trouble. I thought of Napoleon's saying, if he said it, 'It is magnificent, but it is not war.' No, it was slaughter—just slaughter!...
"But, would you believe it, this wall of dead and dying actually enabled these wonderful Germans to creep closer, and actually charge up the glacis! They got no farther than half-way, for our Maxims and rifles swept them back. Of course, we had our own losses, but they were slight compared with the carnage inflicted upon our enemies."