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During the siege, people had learnt to recognize the voice of every fort of Antwerp. They said to each other: "That is Lizele, Wavre Ste. Catherine, Waelhem." One after the other the Belgian guns were silenced, first Wavre, then Waelhem ... and the vibrating boom of the German heavies was heard louder than ever.
Lierre and Waelhem and Duffel were like sieves dripping blood. Corpses were strewn everywhere. Some of the dead were spread-eagled on their backs as though exhausted after a long march, some were twisted and crumpled in attitudes grotesque and horrible, some were propped up against the walls of houses to which they had tried to crawl in their agony.
We crossed the bridge, and passed on to Malines under the guns of Fort Waelhem, with the great fortress of Wavre St. Catharine standing away to the left, impregnable to anything but the huge guns of to-day. Malines is a large town of 60,000 inhabitants, and is the cathedral city of the Archbishop of Belgium, the brave Cardinal Mercier.
"King Albert, the equal of any soldier in his devotion to duty, daily exposes himself to personal danger, while the Queen is devoting her time to the hospitals." The effect of the German siege artillery was especially destructive near Vosburg. Several villages suffered heavily and the barracks at Contich were wrecked. The forts at Waelhem and Wavre-St.
It was brought to us one morning as an offering by a grateful patient, and it came from the neighbourhood of Fort Waelhem. It was a mass of polished steel two feet long, a foot wide, and three inches thick, and it weighed about fifty pounds. It was very irregular in shape, with edges sharp as razors, without a particle of rust upon it.
He wore a sombrero with a cherry-coloured puggaree and a bottle-green cape, and his green stockings turned over at the top so as to show knees as white and shapely as those of a woman. To tell the truth, however, I had nothing for him to do. So when I was not out in the car he occupied himself in running the lift at the Hotel St. Antoine. Joseph was with me during the German attack on Waelhem.
They lay just behind Waelhem, some six miles south of Antwerp, and into them the Germans poured from the other side of Malines a stream of 28-centimetre shells, with the result that the great reservoir burst. Until one has had to do without a water-supply in a large city it is impossible to realize to what a degree we are dependent upon it.
It was a glorious day, and after a heavy morning in the wards the fresh breeze and the brilliant sunshine were delightful. Our road led almost straight south through Vieux Dieu and Contich, crossing the little River Nethe at Waelhem. The Nethe encircles Antwerp on the south and south-east, and it was here that the Belgians, and in the end the British, made their chief stand against the Germans.
She was quite angry with me for mentioning it, but because she is an American of whom her countrypeople have every reason to be proud, I am going to tell about it again. It was during the last days of the siege of Antwerp. The Germans had methodically pounded to pieces with their great guns the chain of barrier forts encircling the city. Waelhem was one of the last to fall.
The ring-forts surrounding Antwerp were knocked to pieces, their huge concrete gateways, their stone facings, their high earthworks, all battered out of shape. Town after town through which we passed lay half-destroyed or in complete ruins. Wavre, Waelhem, Termonde, Duffel, Lierre, and many smaller places were in various stages of destruction, burned or shattered by shell fire and explosives.
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