The Day of Wrath Part 5

Though none of the three in the wagon might even hazard a guess at the tremendous facts, the German wolf had already made his spring and been foiled. Not only had he missed his real quarry, France, he had also broken his fangs on the tough armour of Liege. These things Dalroy and Irene Beresford were to learn soon. The first intimation that the Belgian army had met and actually fought some portion of the invading host came before dawn.

The road to Vise ran nearly parallel with, but some miles north of, the main artery between Aix-la-Chapelle and Liege. During the small hours of the night it held a locust flight of German cavalry. Squadron after squadron, mostly Uhlans, trotted past the slow-moving cart; but Joos's man, Maertz, if stolid and heavy-witted, had the sense to pull well out of the way of these hurrying troopers; beyond evoking an occasional curse, he was not molested. The brilliant moon, though waning, helped the riders to avoid him.

Dalroy and the girl were comfortably seated, and almost hidden, among the sacks of oats; they were free to talk as they listed.

Naturally, a soldier's eyes took in details at once which would escape a woman; but Irene Beresford soon noted signs of the erratic fighting which had taken place along that very road.

"Surely we are in Belgium now?" she whispered, after an awed glance at the lights and bustling activity of a field hospital established near the hamlet of Aubel.

"Yes," said Dalroy quietly, "we have been in Belgium fully an hour."

"And have the Germans actually attacked this dear little country?"

"So it would seem."

"But why? I have always understood that Belgium was absolutely safe. All the great nations of the world have guaranteed her integrity."

"That has been the main argument of every spouter at International Peace Congresses for many a year," said Dalroy bitterly. "If Belgium and Holland can be preserved by agreement, they contended, why should not all other vexed questions be settled by arbitration? Yet one of our chaps in the Berlin Emba.s.sy, the man whose ticket you travelled with, told me that the Kaiser could be bluntly outspoken when that very question was raised during the autumn manoeuvres last year. 'I shall sweep through Belgium thus,' he said, swinging his arm as though brushing aside a feeble old crone who barred his way. And he was talking to a British officer too."

"What a crime! These poor, inoffensive people! Have they resisted, do you think?"

"That field hospital looked pretty busy," was the grim answer.

A little farther on, at a cross-road, there could no longer be any doubt as to what had happened. The remains of a barricade littered the ditches. Broken carts, ploughs, harrows, and hurdles lay in heaps. The carca.s.ses of scores of dead horses had been hastily thrust aside so as to clear a pa.s.sage. In a meadow, working by the light of lanterns, gangs of soldiers and peasants were digging long pits, while row after row of p.r.o.ne figures could be glimpsed when the light carried by those directing the operations chanced to fall on them.

Dalroy knew, of course, that all the indications pointed to a successful, if costly, German advance, which was the last thing he had counted on in this remote countryside. If the tide of war was rolling into Belgium it should, by his reckoning, have pa.s.sed to the south-west, engulfing the upper valley of the Meuse and the two Luxembourgs perhaps, but leaving untouched the placid land on the frontier of Holland. For a time he feared that Holland, too, was being attacked. Understanding something of German pride, though far as yet from plumbing the depths of German infamy, he imagined that the Teutonic host had burst all barriers, and was bent on making the Rhine a German river from source to sea.

Naturally he did not fail to realise that the lumbering wagon was taking him into a country already securely held by the a.s.sailants. There were no guards at the cross-roads, no indications of military precautions.

The hospital, the grave-diggers, the successive troops of cavalry, felt themselves safe even in the semi-darkness, and this was the prerogative of a conquering army. In the conditions, he did not regard his life as worth much more than an hour's purchase, and he tortured his wits in vain for some means of freeing the girl, who reposed such implicit confidence in him, from the meshes of a net which he felt to be tightening every minute. He simply dreaded the coming of daylight, heralded already by tints of heliotrope and pink in the eastern sky.

Certain undulating contours were becoming suspiciously clear in that part of the horizon. It might be only what Hafiz describes as the false dawn; but, false or true, the new day was at hand. He was on the verge of advising Irene to seek shelter in some remote hovel which their guide could surely recommend when Fate took control of affairs.

Maertz had now pulled up in obedience to an unusually threatening order from a Uhlan officer whose horse had been incommoded in pa.s.sing. Above the clatter of hoofs and accoutrements Dalroy's trained ear had detected the sounds of a heavy and continuous cannonade toward the south-west.

"How far are we from Vise?" he asked the driver.

The man pointed with his whip. "You see that black k.n.o.b over there?" he said.

"Yes."

"That's a clump of trees just above the Meuse. Vise lies below it."

"But how far?"

"Not more than two kilometres."

Two kilometres! About a mile and a half! Dalroy was tortured by indecision. "Shall we be there by daybreak?"

"With luck. I don't know what's been happening here. These d.a.m.ned Germans are swarming all over the place. They must be making for the bridge."

"What bridge?"

"The bridge across the Meuse, of course. Don't you know these parts?"

"Not very well."

"I wish I were safe at home; I'd get indoors and stop there," growled the driver, chirping his team into motion again.

Dalroy's doubts were stilled. Better leave this rustic philosopher to work out their common salvation.

A few hundred yards ahead the road bifurcated. One branch led to Vise, the other to Argenteau. Here was stationed a picket, evidently intended as a guide for the cavalry.

Most fortunately Dalroy read aright the intention of an officer who came forward with an electric torch. "Lie as flat as you can!" he whispered to Irene. "If they find us, pretend to be asleep."

"Hi, you!" cried the officer to Maertz, "where the devil do you think you're going?"

"To Joos's mill at Vise," said the gruff Walloon.

"What's in the cart?"

"Oats."

"_Almachtig!_ Where from?"

"Aachen."

"You just pull ahead into that road there. I'll attend to you and your oats in a minute or two."

"But can't I push on?"

The officer called to a soldier. "See that this fellow halts twenty yards up the road," he said. "If he stirs then, put your bayonet through him. These Belgian swine don't seem to understand that they are Germans now, and must obey orders."

The officer, of course, spoke in German, the Walloon in the mixture of Flemish and Low Dutch which forms the _patois_ of the district. But each could follow the other's meaning, and the quaking listeners in the middle of the wagon had no difficulty at all in comprehending the gravity of this new peril.

Maertz was swearing softly to himself; they heard him address a question to the sentry when the wagon stopped again. "Why won't your officer let us go to Vise?" he growled.

"Sheep's-head! do as you're told, or it will be bad for you," was the reply.

The words were hardly out of the soldier's mouth before a string of motor lorries, heavy vehicles with very powerful engines, thundered up from the rear. The leaders pa.s.sed without difficulty, as there was plenty of room. But their broad flat tires sucked up clouds of dust, and the moon had sunk behind a wooded height. One of the hindermost transports, taking too wide a bend, crashed into the wagon. The startled horses plunged, pulled Maertz off his perch, and dragged the wagon into a deep ditch. It fell on its side, and Dalroy and his companion were thrown into a field amid a swirl of laden sacks, some of which burst.

Dalroy was unhurt, and he could only hope that the girl also had escaped injury. Ere he rose he clasped her around the neck and clapped a hand over her mouth lest she should scream. "Not a word!" he breathed into her ear. "Can you manage to crawl on all-fours straight on by the side of the hedge? Never mind thorns or nettles. It's our only chance."

In a few seconds they were free of the hubbub which sprang up around the overturned wagon and the transport, the latter having shattered a wheel.

Soon they were able to rise, crouching behind the hedge as they ran.

They turned at an angle, and struck off into the country, following the line of another hedge which trended slightly uphill. At a gateway they turned again, moving, as Dalroy calculated, on the general line of the Vise road. A low-roofed shanty loomed up suddenly against the sky. It was just the place to house an outpost, and Dalroy was minded to avoid it when the lowing of a cow in pain revealed to his trained intelligence the practical certainty that the animal had been left there unattended, and needed milking. Still, he took no unnecessary risks.

"Remain here," he murmured. "I'll go ahead and investigate, and return in a minute or so."

He did not notice that the girl sank beneath the hedge with a suspicious alacrity. He was a man, a fighter, with the hot breath of war in his nostrils. Not yet had he sensed the cruel strain which war places on women. Moreover, his faculties were centred in the task of the moment.

The soldier is warned not to take his eyes off the enemy while reloading his rifle lest the target be lost; similarly, Dalroy knew that concentration was the prime essential of scout-craft.