Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 30264-h.htm or 30264-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30264/30264-h/30264-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30264/30264-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries. See http://www.archive.org/details/ligeonlineofma00bige LIÉGE ON THE LINE OF MARCH [Illustration: GLENNA L. BIGELOW] LIÉGE ON THE LINE OF MARCH An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium by GLENNA LINDSLEY BIGELOW New York: John Lane Company London: John Lane, The Bodley Head MCMXVIII Copyright, 1918, by John Lane Company _TO THE KING OF THE BELGIANS_ _Multitudes upon multitudes they throng And thicken: who shall number their array? They bid the peoples tremble and obey: Their faces are set forward, all for wrong. They trample on the covenant and are strong And terrible. Who shall dare to say them nay? How shall a little nation bar the way Where that resistless host is borne along?_ _You never thought, O! gallant King, to bow To overmastering force and stand aside. Safe and secure you might have reigned. But now Your Belgium is transfigured, glorified, The friend of France and England, who avow An Equal here, and thank the men who died._ _H. M._ _London Times, August 14, 1914._ FOREWORD Liége on the Line of March, or An American Girl's Experience When the Germans Came Through Belgium, is a unique story. No other American probably was in the exact position of Miss Bigelow who was at the Château d'Angleur, Liége, Belgium, with the family of Monsieur X. at the outbreak of the war and experienced with them and the people of their country those tragic events which, up to the present, have hardly even been sketched for the world. What the public already knows of armies, guns, trenches, etc., has little to do with the suffering that the people of an invaded country endures, when the white-hot flame of the enemy invasion sweeps over the land scorching every flower and leaving in its wake only desolation and pain and despair. This narrative describes in detail just what might come to any one of its readers if the Germans were victorious in Europe. Let him picture to himself his line of action or even his line of thought if an insolent officer came into his home, took his paintings from the wall, his rugs from the floor, his private papers from his desk and, finally, his sons to--what fate? The most pacific of pacifists would draw a tight breath at such proceedings. And these are the least of things that have happened in Belgium. But the journal was not written with exhortative design. It is the simple and truthful story of daily events as they occurred; if, at times, the words seem brutal, the circumstances were brutal. Why should one not know them?