The composition of it--for me--was perfect now.
I mean no levity when I say that Liege was well shaken before taken; but merely that the phrase is the apt one for use, because it better expresses the truth than any other I can think of.

Yet, considering what it went through, last month, Liege seemed to have emerged in better shape than one would have expected.
Driving into the town I saw more houses with white flags--the emblem of complete surrender--fluttering from sill and coping, than houses bearing marks of the siege.

In the bombardment the shells mostly appeared to have passed above the town--which was natural enough, seeing that the principal Belgian forts stood on the hilltops westward of and overlooking the city; and the principal German batteries--at least, until the last day of fighting--were posted behind temporary defenses, hastily thrown up, well to the east and north.
Liege, squatted in the natural amphitheater below, practically escaped the fire of the big guns.

The main concern of the noncombatants, they tell me, was to shelter themselves from the street fighting, which, by all accounts, was both stubborn and sanguinary.

The doughty Walloons who live in this corner of Belgium have had the name of being sincere and willing workers with bare steel since the days when Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, sought to curb their rebellious spirits by razing their city walls and massacring some ten thousand of them.