There was not a street in which shells had not fallen. The very asphalt was ploughed up in places like a cornfield at sowing time. Hurriedly-made graves with their soft mounds protruded in unexpected places. During the day the Germans were everywhere in evidence: they patrolled the principal thoroughfares, stood at the barricades which they had raised at all the approaches to the town, or crept up towards the forts with remarkable recklessness. Nine of them on bicycles rode to within 300 mètres of the forts one morning; eight returned unharmed, only one paying for the pleasant sense of daring adventure with his life. The inhabitants were cowed by recent deterrent examples and by the terrors hanging over them. At nightfall the city assumed the aspect of a churchyard. The silence was soul-curdling, yet the hearts of the inhabitants beat quicker and louder when that silence was broken by the heavy tread of the Prussian patrols or the rending thunder of heavy guns. All the doors still extant had to be kept wide open. Early in the morning when the bakers removed their bread from the ovens, German guards, posted wherever victuals are to be had, were in the habit of pouncing down on the entire output of the bakeries, for which they sometimes paid; but the ill-starred inhabitants had no share. The soldiers made their own coffee and soup in great motor cauldrons, from which it was poured into metal porringers that they carry with them. They now wore reformed field uniforms, rendering them hardly distinguishable from a distance, just as their airships were so re-painted as to resemble the grey of cloudland. At Haelen and Diest, the scene of Wednesday's engagement, one drew nearer to the ghastly realities of war. The struggle waxed desperate, man meeting man, striking, thrusting, and wrestling in the final fight for life or death. Here the once peaceful country-side was utterly transformed. In the background heaps of ruins that so lately were farmhouses still emitted pungent smoke. Between the leafy trees one saw the charred rents in the dwellings still erect, animals erring hither and thither, barricades hastily erected of dead horses, their horrible wounds gaping and spreading the mephitic reek of death, and along the carriage-road on either side freshly-made ridges which hid the German dead.