Opposite the great
University there was a big, black, ragged scar to show where a block of
dwellings had stood.
Liege, to judge from its surface aspect, could not well have been
quieter. Business went on; buyers and sellers filled the side streets
and dotted the long stone quays. Old Flemish men fished industriously
below the wrecked stone bridge, where the debris made new eddies in the
swift, narrow stream; and blue pigeons swarmed in the plaza before the
Palais de Justice, giving to the scene a suggestion of St. Mark's Square
at Venice.
The German Landwehr, who were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants
civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against
the Germans. But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble
was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us. We talked
with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been
a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper. He received us beneath the
portico of the Theatre Royale, built after the model of the Odeon in
Paris.
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