August 7th, Friday.
More or less booming from the forts all day. As communications of every kind have been cut off, we cannot know what is happening. But where is the assistance so direfully needed, promised by both France and England to poor little Belgium with the great German army moving on Liége? Everybody has faith, however, in the Allies, and in the streets it is pathetic to hear people assuring each other, "O, oui, les Français viennent ce soir" (Oh, yes, the French are coming to-night). There are many German troops in town already, who somehow have pushed their way in between the firing, but the city will not cede the forts, so the bombardment may begin at any moment. I cannot define my impressions—some day I may be able to, but just now I do not know what they are. Happily the château is on the edge of the city and there is a certain quiet at present, but in town pandemonium reigns. Men, women and children are fleeing in all directions with their few most precious possessions tied up in a bundle. And where are they going to, the poor things, with all roads in the country choked up, soldiers and trenches everywhere?
August 8th, Saturday.
This morning we walked through the garden to service in the little village church. For a short moment a welcome calm stole over us in the quiet of those walls, but how sinister to hear the eternal boom of cannon between the words of the Mass. All the bridges of the city are mined and guarded. The five days given Liége by the Prussians to surrender are up tonight. What will tomorrow bring forth? The Belgians have blown up the tunnel at Trois Ponts, near the German frontier, as well as the railroad in many places, which will impede the enemy's advance considerably, and great trees have been cut down across the roads in all the country roundabout.
Mère Gavin came hobbling down the path from the top of the hill this evening to tell us of the astonishing experience she had this afternoon when a peasant came to her old hut and offered to buy her cow. Now as her cow is her most precious possession and her sole support she refused at once, tho' frightened at her own boldness. The stranger, however, was rather insistent and asked if she would rent the cow, then, for fifty francs an hour? Was there ever a queerer offer? Of course fifty francs was a gold-mine to Mère Gavin, so she accepted, and was fairly overcome when the man laid down three hundred francs on the table and told her to keep them for him. Then he drove the cow away over the hills while Mère G. sat staring stupidly at her gold. After a time he came back (with the cow) and said, "Old One, three hours after I have gone, you can tell your people that the red pantalons (French soldiers) will be here in forty-eight hours." Was that not a clever way for a French Scout to find out the lie of the land?
August 9th, Sunday.
Some of the Prussians have succeeded in penetrating into the city, tho' the forts have not surrendered, and are already establishing martial rule. Aeroplanes, with the wings turned back, Taubes, have been flying about all the morning. In the afternoon we went up over the hill to the plain of Sartilmont, the battlefield of Wednesday night. All along the road were heaps of uniforms, some quite new, probably taken from the dead. Those horrid limp things made me shiver with their lifelessness, and the spirit of death, everywhere, seemed to close us in. Countless numbers of haversacks were strewn about, doubtless cast away by the soldiers to disencumber themselves in falling quickly back from one position to another. In them, generally, was a change of underwear, light boots, hard biscuit, canned meats and confiture. Already a flock of human ravens was collected about the piles of débris, sorting out what was good to take and collecting fragments of bread for a happy repast. It was sickening to see, when possibly some of those brave, dead soldiers were lying, yet unburied, in the nearby hedges and ravines. Arrived at the little village we saw destruction a plenty. The inhabitants all had terror-stricken countenances and yet in their desire to please, literally fell over each other in haste to tell and show. Some of the buildings were entirely demolished, others with doors hacked up and windows broken, while everywhere houses and trees were riddled with bullets. One old peasant woman told me that she and fifty others were imprisoned for twenty-four hours by the Germans in a tiny stable, without food or drink, and for no apparent reason.
The battlefield on the top of a ridge of hills between the Ourthe and the Meuse is a large plain, around the edges of which lay scores of magnificent trees cut down in haste to give unobstructed range. Their branches had been previously soaked in pétrole and set on fire. The effect of those prostrate, charred monsters added to the desolation all around. Across the end of the plain were those famous open trenches of "two stories," that is, with about a two-foot elevation of earth in the bottom against the front wall of the ditch, forming a kind of platform for the soldiers when taking aim.