But western Belgium is largely a manufacturing country, though still marked by rich rural beauty. Even the main Belgian coalfield extending through the provinces of Hainault and West Flanders presents outwardly few of those evidences of utilitarian squalor commonly associated with coal and iron. The centre of the coal and iron industries of Western Belgium is Mons, a quaint old place built upon a hill rising amid a country thickly intersected by canals and railways. Looking east from Mons, we are looking down the valley of the Sambre, on each side low rolling hills, the sides and crests of which are in part clothed with woods and plantations. These hills are, so to say, the outworks of the Ardennes, one of the natural show-places of Europe. Fifteen miles from Mons, and on the north bank of the Sambre, is the town of Charleroi. Fifteen miles farther, at the juncture of the Sambre with the Meuse, rises the rocky mass forming the ancient citadel of Namur. The Sambre is not a wide stream, but is swift, its course alternating between rapids and deep pools. It is most passable, in the military sense, about ten miles west of Namur. Just there the river follows a succession of sharp bends. Of the huge land Armada now moving south through this busy and populous but beautiful country, most people think as being in every sense a modern European army. But it was not. There were surgeons with it, but no field hospitals. It had encumbered itself with no tents. There was all the grim apparatus of modern war, but only the least possible of modern war’s humane apparatus. It was the intention of those who could to quarter themselves on the population of the country through which the host passed; to supplement food supplies by eating up the country’s resources. The mass of the invaders slept, where other shelter was not to be had, in the fields. These hardships sharpened the lust of conquest. At the rear of the host trudged battalions of gravediggers. But they were to dig the graves of those who would dare to stand against it. The comparative poverty and the native parsimony of the Prussians was reflected in these arrangements. Their all had been invested in artillery and instruments of death because the leaders of the host were sure of victory. What else they needed when winter came would be provided from the spoil of the conquered. In appearance a modern army, it presented essential features in common with the migrations of Huns and Goths, which form in Europe the history of the early Middle Ages. Under a modern disguise, it was a similar horde. It is easy, therefore, to estimate the rage and surprise which thwarted hopes, wounded pride, and heavy losses had produced in Belgium, and why there was behind it a land of mourning and blood.