For the moment all they knew was that the Germans were in the town, as none of them yet had ventured outside the building. At present their great fear was that Germans might be billeted on them.... Oh! they might take everything if only they did not come themselves. When I left I got a lot of addresses of relations in The Netherlands, and undertook to send a postcard to each of these. They also gave me an introduction to the proprietor of an hotel whom they knew, in which they asked him to give me a bed; and thus armed I succeeded at last. It was high time too, for at nine o'clock everyone had to be at home. In the hotel everything was dark, for there was no gas in the town. At last I could lie down on my bed, and had a good rest, although I could not sleep a wink. I was too tired and had seen and experienced too much that day. The next morning at six I was out and about again. I had not been able to get any breakfast, for the people themselves had nothing. The Germans had called at all the hotels and shops requisitioning everything in stock to feed the thousands who had invaded Liège like so many locusts. The inhabitants practically starved during those days, and carefully saved up bits of bread already as hard as bricks. It was a good thing that the night before I had eaten something at the nunnery, for although at a shop I offered first one, and later on two francs for a piece of bread, I could not get any. All the forts thundered away again, and the guns of the Germans were also busy on the citadel and the various surrounding heights. Already early in the morning a terrible and suffocating smoke of fire and gunpowder hovered over Liège. The smoke came down also from the burning villages, like Bressoux, on the slopes of the hills near Liège. The flames flared up from the houses and offered a melancholy sight. German officers told me, with full particulars, how the inhabitants of those burning villages had offered German soldiers poisoned cocoa, coffee, and cigarettes, for which crime three hundred civilians had been shot during the night in a Liège square. As even high officers told me those things, not without some emotion, I began to believe them and wrote something about them to my paper. But what was made clear to me at a later visit! That there was not a word of truth in the whole story of that poisoning; that on that day and in that square no shooting had taken place; that a couple of days before the population had been ordered to leave their houses within two hours without any reason being given; and afterwards several houses had simply been burned down.