s to
commit some new outrage. They stayed with us for a while, but at
the sight of our cinema man turning the crank like a machine gun,
they turned and ran wildly down the street.

Emptied bottles looted from winecellars were strung along the
curbs. To some Germans they had been more fatal than the
Belgian bullets, for while one detachment of the German soldiers
had been setting the city blazing with petrol from the petrol flasks,
others had set their insides on fire with liquors from the wine flasks,
and, rolling through the town in drunken orgy, they had fallen
headlong into the canal.

There is a relevant item for those who seek further confirmation as
to the reality of the atrocities in Belgium. If men could get so
drunken and uncontrolled as to commit atrocities on themselves (i.e.,
self-destruction), it is reasonable to infer that they could commit
atrocities on others--and they undoubtedly did. The surprise lies
not in the number of such crimes, but the fewness of them.

Three boys who had somehow managed to crawl across the
bridge were prodding about in the canals with bamboo poles.

"What are you doing?" we inquired.

"Fishing," they responded.

"What for?" we asked.

"Dead Germans," they replied.

"What do you do with them--bury them?"

"No!" they shouted derisively. "We just strip them of what they've
got and shove 'em back in."

Their search for these hapless victims was not motivated by any
sentimental reasons, but simply by their business interest as local
dealers in helmets, buttons and other German mementos.

We took pictures of these young water-ghouls; a picture of the
Hotel de Ville, the calcined walls standing like a shell, the inside a
smoking mass of debris; then a picture of a Belgian mitrailleuse
car, manned by a crowd of young and jaunty dare-devils. It came
swinging into the square, bringing a lot of bicycles from a German
patrol which had just been mowed down outside the city. After
taking a shot at an aeroplane buzzing away at a tremendous
distance overhead, they were off again on another scouting trip.

I got separated from my party and was making my way alone
when a sharp "Hello!" ringing up the street, startled me. I turned to
see, not one of the photographers, but a fully-armed, though
somewhat diminutive, soldier in Belgian uniform waving his hand
at me.

"Hello!" he shouted; "are you an American?"

I could hardly believe my eyes or my ears, but managed to shout
back