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If you could imagine five hundred of the worst thunderstorms, shaken up together, that you ever experienced, you would arrive at a mild notion of the tumult, not counting the apprehension, the danger and that terrifying voice in the whistling trail of every shell which sings, "This time I'll get you." At four this afternoon the Fort of Chaudefontaine fell, blown up by the Prussians.
They have begun to talk after a fashion, though their poor, dried lips can hardly accomplish the task. Jean, the big fellow who jumped seven metres into the ditch from Fort Chaudefontaine when it blew up, died this morning, the result of a fractured skull.
En route we passed by Fort d'Embourg, which still has some of its cupolas, and Fort Chaudefontaine, which our burned soldiers defended and which is demolished. For miles around the country has been flattened, one may say, from the operation of the cannon and looks as if a cyclone had hurried across it.
Hadelin, east of Chaudefontaine, which reappears after an underground course of a mile or two; others, like the Vesdre, which is lost near Goffontaine, and after a time re-emerges; some, again, like the torrent near Magnee, which, after entering a cave, never again comes to the day.
Among the sections obtained by quarrying, one of the finest which I saw was in the beautiful valley of Fond du Foret, above Chaudefontaine, not far from the village of Magnee, where one of the rents communicating with the surface has been filled up to the brim with rounded and half-rounded stones, angular pieces of limestone and shale, besides sand and mud, together with bones, chiefly of the cave-bear.
He was the splendid pointeur of Fort Chaudefontaine and was the least burned of the men; that is why I know he is beautiful; also I catch many glimpses of him in the little mirror in which he is constantly regarding himself, but he is bon garçon, nevertheless his honest blue eyes attest it. At the end of the row is the big Flamand, who was always two feet too long for his bed.
At any rate, in the course of the Thursday, the fort next westward from Fléron, Chaudefontaine, was smashed. The gap was now quite untenable, and the first body of German cavalry entered the city. The incident has been reported as a coup de main, with the object of capturing the Belgian general. Its importance to the military story is simply that it proved the way to be open.
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