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LIEGE
ON THE LINE OF MARCH


[Illustration: GLENNA L. BIGELOW]


LIEGE
ON THE LINE OF MARCH

An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium

by

GLENNA LINDSLEY BIGELOW







New York: John Lane Company
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
MCMXVIII

Copyright, 1918, by
John Lane Company




_TO THE KING OF THE BELGIANS_


    _Multitudes upon multitudes they throng
    And thicken: who shall number their array?
    They bid the peoples tremble and obey:
    Their faces are set forward, all for wrong.
    They trample on the covenant and are strong
    And terrible. Who shall dare to say them nay?
    How shall a little nation bar the way
    Where that resistless host is borne along?_

    _You never thought, O! gallant King, to bow
    To overmastering force and stand aside.
    Safe and secure you might have reigned. But now
    Your Belgium is transfigured, glorified,
    The friend of France and England, who avow
    An Equal here, and thank the men who died._

  _H. M._
  _London Times, August 14, 1914._




FOREWORD


Liege on the Line of March, or An American Girl's Experience When the
Germans Came Through Belgium, is a unique story. No other American
probably was in the exact position of Miss Bigelow who was at the
Chateau d'Angleur, Liege, Belgium, with the family of Monsieur X. at the
outbreak of the war and experienced with them and the people of their
country those tragic events which, up to the present, have hardly even
been sketched for the world.

What the public already knows of armies, guns, trenches, etc., has
little to do with the suffering that the people of an invaded country
endures, when the white-hot flame of the enemy invasion sweeps over the
land scorching every flower and leaving in its wake only desolation and
pain and despair. This narrative describes in detail just what might
come to any one of its readers if the Germans were victorious in Europe.
Let him picture to himself his line of action or even his line of
thought if an insolent officer came into his home, took his paintings
from the wall, his rugs from the floor, his private papers from his
desk and, finally, his sons to--what fate? The most pacific of pacifists
would draw a tight breath at such proceedings. And these are the least
of things that have happened in Belgium.

But the journal was not written with exhortative design. It is the
simple and truthful story of daily events as they occurred; if, at
times, the words seem brutal, the circumstances were brutal. Why should
one not know them?

The Chateau d'Angleur was respected as far as real pillaging and
destroying were concerned for the fact that a cousin of Monsieur X., a
Belgian by birth, is the wife of the Count von M. of Germany, at one
time Grand Chancellor of the Imperial Court and a trusted friend of
Emperor William the Second. As was proven afterwards this relationship,
surprisingly enough, had some influence on the side of clemency.

Monsieur X. was one of that family of famous Belgian bankers which has
existed for four generations. He was also President of the International
Sleeping Car Company of Europe to which honor he was appointed at the
death of his brother Monsieur Georges X., the originator and founder of
the Company.

Madame X. is a Russian by birth, the great-granddaughter of Prince ----,
who was at one time Grand Chancellor of the Court of Russia, and a
cousin of Princess ----, a lady in waiting to Her Former Majesty the
Czarina of Russia. The daughter of Madame X., Baronne de H., wife of a
Belgian nobleman of Brussels, is a personal friend of Their Majesties,
the King and Queen of Belgium.

Miss Bigelow, though a neutral subject, was nevertheless a virtual
prisoner of the Germans from August to November, 1914, owing