At the Sign of the Sword Part 20

"Do not be distressed, Mademoiselle," urged old Uncle Francois, placing his big, heavy hand kindly upon the girl's shoulder. "You are safe here, and besides, our soldiers will soon drive out the enemy, as they did before."

As he spoke, the earth shook beneath the roar of a big field-gun.

"Hark! They are firing upon them from the citadel?" he added.

That night proved one of breathless suspense. The sound of intermittent firing could be heard, even down in that vaulted cellar, together with the heavier explosions which, ever and anon, shook the ancient place to its very foundations.

Uncle Francois and his daughter busied themselves in making coffee for the refugees, poor, frantic women, who dreaded what fate might befall their husbands and brothers. Many of them knelt piously and aloud besought the protection of the Almighty against the barbarians.

Dawn came at last, and with it large ma.s.ses of German troops swept into the town. Some sharp fighting had occurred along the heights above the Meuse, but during the night the gallant defenders had been driven out of the town, being compelled to fall back along the wide valley towards Namur.

Edmond Valentin worked his gun valiantly, with a fierce, dogged determination not to leave Aimee in the hands of the brutal soldiery.

But it was all to no purpose. The order was given to retire, and he was compelled to withdraw with his comrades under cover of darkness.

"The pigs shall die?" he muttered fiercely to himself. He clenched his teeth, and, even after the order to "cease fire," he still worked his Maxim, mowing down a squad of twenty or so German infantrymen who had just entered the Place below, at the spot where he and Aimee had stood together only a short time before.

Aimee was down there, in that stricken town! Could he thus abandon her to her fate!

He blamed himself for advising her to go to the house of Uncle Francois.

She should have kept on the road towards Namur, for had she done so, she would have now been beyond the danger zone.

A shrapnel bullet had grazed his left wrist, and around it he had hastily wrapped a piece of dirty rag, which was now already saturated with blood. But in his chagrin at their compulsory retreat, he heeded not his injury. The welfare of the sweet girl, whom he loved more dearly than his own life, was his only thought.

His brigade, thus driven from their position, withdrew in the darkness over the hills to behind the village of Houx, where the long railway-bridge crossing the Meuse, destroyed a few days ago by the defenders, was now lying a wreck of twisted ironwork in the stream.

There they took up a second defensive position.

But meanwhile in Dinant the Germans, filled with the blood-l.u.s.t of triumph, and urged on by their cultured "darlings" of Berlin drawing-rooms--those degenerate elegants who were receiving tin crosses from their Kaiser because of the "frightful examples" they were making-- were now committing atrocities more abominable even than those once committed in Bulgaria, and denounced by the whole civilised world.

Into the big, ill-lit cellar descended a terrified woman who told an awful story. German soldiers were smashing in the doors of every house, and murdering everybody found within.

"My poor husband has just been killed before my very eyes!" shrieked the poor, half-demented creature. "My two children also! The Imites! They stabbed them with their bayonets! I flew, and they did not catch me.

They are arresting all women, and taking them up to the Monastery. They will be here soon."

"Here!" gasped Aimee, her face suddenly white as death. "Surely they will not come here?" she cried.

"They will?" shouted the frantic, half-crazed woman, who had seen her beloved husband fall beneath the bullets of the soldiers ere they, laughingly, set fire to her house. "They will?"

Scarcely had she spoken before a young man, Pierre Fievet, a nephew of Uncle Francois, limped down the broken steps into the cellar, wounded in the foot, and, calling the old man aside, said in a low voice in his native Walloon dialect:

"Don't alarm the women. But the situation outside is fearful." He was a young doctor, and well known in Dinant. "About sixty workmen at the cotton-mill, together with our friend Himmer, the manager, have just been found in hiding under a culvert," he added. "They have all been shot--everyone of them. The soldiers are using bombs to set fire to the houses everywhere. It is a raging furnace outside?"

"_Dieu_!" gasped the old man. "What shall we do?"

"Heaven help us! I do not know," replied the young doctor. "I only just managed to escape with my life. I saw, only a minute or two ago, in the Place d'Armes, quite two hundred men and boys--old men of seventy-five and boys of twelve, many of whom I knew--drawn up, and then shot down by a machine-gun. Pere Jules, our old friend, was among them--and surely he was fully eighty!"

"Holy Jesu! May G.o.d place His curse upon these Germans?" cried the old fellow fervently. "As surely as there is a G.o.d in heaven, so a.s.suredly shall we be avenged by a Hand which is stronger and more relentless than the Kaiser's in wreaking vengeance. What else do you know?" he inquired eagerly.

"Xavier Wa.s.seige, manager of the Banque de la Meuse, has been shot, together with his two sons, and Camille Finette and his little boy of twelve have also been murdered. They are wiping out the whole, district of Saint Medart, between the station and the bridge. All is in flames.

The soldiers are worse than African savages. The new post-office has been burnt and blown up. It is only a heap of ruins."

Uncle Francois knit his grey brows, and gazed steadily into his nephew's eyes.

"Look here! Are you lying, Pierre?" he asked. "Have you really seen all this?"

"Yes. I have seen it with my own eyes."

"I don't believe you," declared the old man bluntly. "I will go out and see for myself what these German fiends are doing."

"Oh! In the name of G.o.d, don't!" cried his nephew in quick apprehension. "You will certainly be killed. The whole of the Rue Sax, along by the river-bank, is burning. Not a single house has escaped.

They intend, it seems, to destroy all our town, on both sides of the river, now that they have repaired their pontoon. Think that we have lived in Dinant to witness this!"

"But what shall we do?" gasped the poor old fellow. "How can we save these poor women?" His words were overheard by Aimee, who rose quickly and came forward, asking:

"What has happened?" and, indicating the young man, she asked, "What has this gentleman been telling you?"

"Oh--well--nothing very important, Mademoiselle," Francois answered with hesitation. "This is Doctor Pierre Fievet, my nephew, and he has just brought me a message. There is no real danger, Mademoiselle," he a.s.sured her. "Our splendid troops are still close by, and will drive the invaders out, as before. The brigand, Von Emmich, will meet his deserts before long, depend upon it, my dear Mademoiselle."

The girl, thus a.s.sured, withdrew to allow the two men to continue their conversation, which she believed to be of a private character.

"Don't alarm these women, Pierre," whispered old Francois. "Poor creatures, they are suffering enough already," "But what will you do?

What can you do? At any moment they may burn down this place--and you will all be suffocated like rats in a hole."

"And, surely, that will be a far better fate for the women, than if the soldiers seize them," was the old man's hard response. "I, and your cousin Marie, will die with them here--if it is necessary. I, for one, am not afraid to die. I have made my peace with G.o.d. I am too old and feeble to handle a rifle, but when I was young I was a soldier of Belgium. Our little country has shown the world that she can fight. If the great wave of Germany sweeps further upon us we must necessarily be crushed out of existence. But the Powers, France, England, and Russia, will see that our memory--our grave--is avenged. I still believe, Pierre, in our country, and in our good King Albert!"

"Forty men over at the brewery of Nicaise Freres, who were found in the cellars an hour ago, were brought out and shot," the young man said.

"But ah! _mon oncle_, you should have witnessed the scene in the Place d'Armes--how they placed our poor, innocent townspeople against the wall--ranging them in rows, under pretence that the German Colonel was to address them. A miserable spy, who spoke Walloon as fluently as I do myself, shouted that Colonel Beeger wished to speak to them, and to urge them to bow to the inevitable, and become German subjects. They were all attention, ready to listen, and little dreaming the awful fate in store for them. They never foresaw the German treachery until a little grey machine-gun at the corner, with the four men behind it, suddenly rattled out, and in a few moments the whole of them were wallowing in their own life-blood. Ah! it was fearful, cruel, inhuman--_ghastly_!

And this is in our civilised age!"

"Pierre," exclaimed the good-natured old fellow softly, so that the women in that dank Dantesque vault should not overhear. "Our G.o.d is the G.o.d of justice and of righteousness. These murderers may wreck and desecrate our churches; they may kill our dear devoted priests; they may ridicule our religion, yet the great G.o.d who watches over us will, most a.s.suredly, grind in His mill the arrogant nation that has sought to crush the world beneath Prussian despotism. We may die to-day in our good cause, but the Kaiser to-morrow will be hurled down and die accursed by humanity, and d.a.m.ned to h.e.l.l by his Creator!"

"True, our poor people are falling beneath German bullets--though they have committed no offence against the German nation--yet what can you do here? You seem to be caught in a trap. What shall you do with these women?"

"Heaven knows?" gasped the honest old fellow. "What can I do? What do you suggest?" and he wrung his hands.

At that moment a white-haired old man, nearly eighty years of age, staggered down the broken steps, shrieking:

"Ah! Let me die! Let me die! The brutes are shooting men and boys in the Place, and now the soldiers are here--_to kill us all_!"

A terrible panic ensued at those significant words. The women huddled together, shrieked and screamed, for there, sure enough, came down the stone steps a grey-coated German soldier in spiked canvas-covered helmet, shouting roughly some command in German, and carrying his gleaming bayonet fixed before him.

"You women must all come up out of here!" cried a stern voice in bad French, as several other soldiers followed the first who had descended, until a dozen stood in the cellar.

The poor frightened creatures shrieked, wailed, and prayed for protection.

But the brutal soldiers, led by a swaggering young lieutenant of the Brandenburg infantry, were obdurate and commenced to roughly ill-treat the women, and cuff them towards the steps.

Uncle Francois raised his voice in loud protest, but next second a shot rang sharply out, and he fell dead upon the stones, a bullet through his heart, while the brute who had shot him roughly kicked his body aside with a German oath.