“this indignity you place upon us, two defenceless women, compelled as we are to entertain our enemies, is, I suppose, but the fortune of war. You and your officers are quite welcome here at my table, but I would ask you to order your men to behave with decency, for I heard — only yesterday — some terrible stories of the conduct of Uhlans further up the valley.”
The officer bowed.
“Madame,” he said, “I assure you that you need not have the slightest apprehension. In the German Army we punish disobedience by death. My men know that — by examples already set them.”
“My daughter and I have your word, m’sieur — eh?” asked the Baroness.
“Madame,” he replied, “you certainly have my solemn word. To-morrow morning we shall, I hope, relieve you of this incubus, and I trust that you will, by that time, have discovered that we are not the bloodthirsty savages which the world reports us to be.”
The Baroness then called the footman and gave certain orders that the troopers below should be entertained, while half an hour later Baron von Meyeren, who had suddenly betrayed a sabre-rattling overbearing towards the ladies, sat down at the dinner table with his two younger officers, apparently young fops from Berlin.
The Baroness and her daughter refused to sit at table with their enemies.
The swaggering German Baron did not ask for what he wanted. He simply ordered it from his orderly who stood behind him.
The wine served did not exactly suit his palate, whereupon he told the orderly to go down into the cellars and ascertain what they contained.
“Bring us up some good wine,” he added in German. “The best these people have. They are sure to have something worth drinking. And give the men some also. It will keep up their spirits.”
The two women were sitting at the further end of the long room, watching the weird scene, the three men laughing and eating beneath the zone of light shed by the dozen or so lighted candles.
Soon the orderly returned with six bottles of Baron de Neuville’s choicest champagne. These they opened themselves, and in loud, harsh voices, brutally drank the health of their hostess and her daughter.
Beneath a veneer of polish and culture which that trio of the enemy wore, was a coarseness and brutality which were at once revealed, for they laughed uproariously, gossiping together in German, with coarse remarks, which only Aimée, sitting in silence, understood.
They swallowed the wine in tumblers — the choice wine of Belgium’s great millionaire — and very soon they demanded that the Baroness and her daughter should sit with them at table.
Again they refused, but both women discerned the drunken leers in the eyes of the men, yet believing the assurance of the Uhlan commander, the word of a German nobleman, they were not frightened. Nevertheless the swords those men wore at their sides bore the blood of the innocent people massacred to provide the “frightful examples” which the Kaiser had laughingly given to their brave little nation, which had no quarrel with the bombastic and treacherous monarch who had self-styled himself the War Lord of Europe.
“Come, Mademoiselle!” cried von Meyeren. “Do not sit over there. We are enemies, but we will not hurt you. And you, Baroness!” he cried, rising and going across to them, “I insist upon your having dinner. It is not fair, is it, Heinrich?” he asked, addressing the elder of the pair.
“No. The Baroness must join us. She must,” he said.
The two women refused, but with their heads elevated by wine the three men insisted, and at last, in order to pacify them, the mother and daughter consented to sit at the further end of the table, though they would eat nothing.
“Here’s health to the Fatherland?” cried the younger of the three, getting up unsteadily and spilling his wine as he raised it to his lips amid the “Hochs” of his two companions.
The scene was surely as disgraceful as it was unexpected. Baron de Neuville’s wife and daughter left there, alone and unprotected, in that great mediaeval château, had accepted the word of honour of a Saxon nobleman. They had never expected to witness such a scene of drunkenness as that!
Suddenly, from somewhere below, sounded men’s shouts and women’s screams. Were the men below drunk, like their officers? Again and again was the uproar repeated.
The Baroness rang the bell, but there was no response.
“Whatever can be happening below?” asked Aimée, full of fear. Now that the officers were drunk, what hope was there for the Kaiser’s barbaric savages in the servants’ hall?
Again the bell was rung, when Mélanie, in her cap and apron, dashed into the room, crying:
“Ah! Madame! It is terrible — terrible! The soldiers are wrecking the salon. They are ripping the furniture with their swords. They are all drunk, Madame — the beasts are all drunk?”
The girl was flushed and dishevelled. Her hair was down, and she was panting, having, truth to tell, just escaped the embraces of a too amorous German in his cups.
The cultured Baron Wernher von Meyeren heard the maid’s complaint to her mistress, and laughed heartily.
“Our men are evidently enjoying themselves,” he remarked in German to his two brother-officers. “This Baron de Neuville is the richest man in Belgium. It is fun to be in his house — is it not? And his daughter is pretty too. What do you think — eh?”
Aimée overheard the words of the “blonde beast.”
She stood boldly before him, and turned upon him like a tiger.
“You Uhlan?” cried her mother. “Your very regiment is synonymous of all that is treacherous and ill-begotten. If you do not respect women, then I believe all that is told of you. Let your God-cursed Emperor let loose his hordes upon us, but the day will come, and is not far distant, when the finger of God will be placed upon you, and you, a nobleman of Saxony, will be withered and die as a stickleback will die beneath the sun.”
“Oh, mother! Do be careful what you say. Pray be careful!” urged Aimée, clinging to her beseechingly.
The gallant Baron, with crimson face, rose unsteadily, gripping the edge of the table to prevent himself from falling, and in fierce anger cried:
“For those words to us, woman, your house shall suffer,” and drawing his sword, he swept from the table the beautiful épergnes of flowers and china baskets of fruit, and, staggering to the wall, he slashed viciously the fine old tapestries, in his frantic drunken rage.
“Ernst,” he hiccoughed to one of the officers, “tell the men below that this Belgian woman has insulted us while we are her guests, and let them make an example of this fine Baron’s castle.”
“No, no?” shrieked Aimée. “No, I beg of you, Baron — I beg of you to spare our home. Remember your word to us!” cried the girl frantically in German.
But he only laughed triumphantly in her face, and the man he addressed as Ernst, having left to do his bidding, he with the other officer and two grey-coated orderlies, gleefully commenced to wreck the splendid room, while the two terrified women, clinging to each other, stood in a corner watching how they vented their mad ire upon all on which they could lay their hands.
