road cut of the River Meuse, at its
junction with the combined channels of the Ourthe and Vesdre. It
stretches across both sides, being connected by numerous bridges, while
parallel lines of railway follow the course of the main stream. The
trunk line from Germany into Belgium crosses the Meuse at Liege. For the
most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left
bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value.
Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the
squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north
broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the
opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest,
stream-watered region. In its downward course the Meuse flows out of the
Liege trench to expand through what is termed the Dutch Flats.

Liege, at the outbreak of the war, was a place of great wealth and
extreme poverty--a Liege artisan considered himself in prosperity on $5
a week. It was of the first strategic importance to Belgium. Its
situation was that of a natural fortress, barring the advance of a
German army.

The defenses of Liege were hardly worth an enemy's gunfire before 1890.
They had consisted of a single fort on the Meuse right bank, and the
citadel crowning the heights of the old town. But subsequently the
Belgian Chamber voted the necessary sums for fortifying Liege and Namur
on the latest principles. From the plans submitted, the one finally
decided upon was that of the famous Belgian military engineer Henri
Alexis Brialmont. His design was a circle of detached forts, already
approved by German engineers as best securing a city within from
bombardment. With regard to Liege and Namur particularly, Brialmont held
that his plan would make passages of the Meuse at those places
impregnable to an enemy.

When the German army stood before Liege on this fourth day of August, in
1914, the circumference of the detached forts was thirty-one miles with
about two or three miles between them, and at an average of five miles
from the city. Each fort was constructed on a new model to withstand the
highest range and power of offensive artillery forecast in the last
decade of the nineteenth century. When completed they presented the form
of an armored mushroom, thrust upward from a mound by subterranean
machinery. The elevation of the cupola in action disclosed no more of
its surface than was necessary for