I have my mother and sisters still in Belgium, where the German beasts are; and I do not know the truth of them. I pray that they are well; but if I learn that they have come to harm I will never rest until I have had my revenge in Germany. All Belgians will tell you the same as that. How can it be otherwise when they have seen what I have seen--their country run over and beaten down and taken by these German hosts, who have swarmed over it like dirty beasts and fouled it? How well I remember that night in Antwerp when the war broke out! It was eleven o’clock and the church bells were ringing. That was the sound of war. Several days we had been out of barracks, enjoying ourselves; but this night they would not allow us to go out. My mother and sisters and brothers came, crying. They said, “The Germans will kill you!” But I said, “Shut up! It will not be so. Besides, I am a single man, and so I do not care. It is not as if I had a wife and children.” So they were comforted, and I made myself happy by myself. We were singing and whistling and dancing all night in barracks; then in the early morning we marched to Brussels, and after being there two days we were ordered to take the train to go to Liège, to keep the Germans back, and as we went along the people shouted, “Good Belgians! Good Belgians!” We went by train to Liège, fifty miles away. We had got the orders we were waiting for in the evening--the orders to stop the Germans. If we could not stop them there, we were told, they would get through. And how true it proved! We were in the train all night, singing and whistling, and all what we can do in a train to make soldiers happy. The regiment that had gone before my own regiment was fighting. We had gone as reinforcements, and when we got to Liège at four o’clock on that August morning and got out of the train, fighting was going on. I saw the Germans at once--we went straight into the street from the train and fought them. We were excited, yes, but not afraid. They had come into our little country, where they had no right to be, and our only wish was to drive them away. We rushed from the train with our loaded rifles. I did not know Liège. It was all strange to me; but all streets are much the same, and it was enough that the Germans were in them and must be driven out. We fired on them, and they retired; but only a little way and for a little while, because there were so many of them. And in the evening they came back. We fought them in the streets when they came, and we rushed into the houses and shot them from the windows and doorways. Even now, so soon, I learned the truth of what I had said to my weeping mother in the barracks at Antwerp. She said, “The Germans will kill you!” and I told her, “No. I am not afraid of anything. The Germans cannot kill me!” And they did not--not then, and not later, though I was shot in the right arm with an explosive bullet and afterwards in the right foot, of which I will tell you.