In relating my adventures, extending over more than fifteen months, I cannot do better than begin with the starting-point of the whole affair--the Battle of Charleroi. To describe the events which grouped themselves around August 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 25th, 1914, seems like telling old news, but, as a matter of fact, the gigantic struggle named after the Belgian town of ironworks and mines has yet to be recorded. The French Staff has published nothing, unofficial historians--eager to be the first to place their researches before the public--have only given general and often erroneous descriptions of the advance of Von Kluck, Von Buelow, and Von Hausen against Sir John French's forces on the Condé-Mons-Binche line and the Fifth French Army holding the line of the Sambre, and the newspaper accounts are sometimes contradictory. I am not going to weary you with military technicalities; we will leave questions of strategy and tactics alone and direct our attention to the battlefield as seen from two points of view: that of myself, an officer in the French Army, and that of an inhabitant of Charleroi, with whom I was later thrown into contact, and by whose observations, made from the roof of his house, I was fortunate in benefiting. Picture to yourself the sinuous Sambre, flowing in its deep bed through the densely-populated suburbs of Charleroi and the southern end of this formerly fortified town. The town itself, imprisoned by its walls, is but a small place of some thirty thousand inhabitants, but the population is swelled to five hundred thousand by the contiguous suburbs of Montigny, Couillet, Marcinelle, Gilly, Châtelet, Marchiennes, Roux, Jumet, Gosselies, and others which cluster around the ancient nucleus and stretch principally northwards. To fight a battle on such a ground as this was impossible, so the German forces, descending from the north and the east in unknown hundreds of thousands, determined to make for the open-wooded country which lies beyond the southern suburbs of the town. Two tremendous obstacles stood in their way--the closely-packed houses of the suburbs and the strongly-held river. The inhabitants soon learnt to their cost how the first of these was to be overcome. Suddenly, shortly after the appearance of the advance-guard of the German army, violent explosions were heard, accompanied by the pop! pop! pop! of machine-guns and the discharge of musketry. The Huns were blasting a broad way through the suburbs, setting fire to the houses, and--under pretense that they were being fired upon by civilians--shooting the people down in their houses and in the streets. Right through the quarters of Gosselies and Jumet they penetrated; then branched off to the right and left, one band of incendiaries reaching the river through Marchiennes, the other cutting its way through the town and reaching the bridge which connects Montigny and Couillet. These two points were where the enemy first succeeded in crossing the Sambre.