of them knelt piously and aloud besought the protection of the Almighty against the barbarians.
Dawn came at last, and with it large masses 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 Aimée 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 Aimée had stood together only a short time before.
Aimée 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 François. 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-lust 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 Aimée, 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 Fiévet, a nephew of Uncle François, 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. Père Jules, our old friend, was among them — and surely he was fully eighty!”
“Holy Jesu! May God place His curse upon these Germans?” cried the old fellow fervently. “As surely as there is a God in heaven, so assuredly 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 Wasseige, 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 Médart, 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 François 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 God, 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 Aimée, 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,” François answered with hesitation. “This is Doctor Pierre Fiévet, my nephew, and he has just brought me a message. There is no real danger, Mademoiselle,” he assured 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 assured, 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 François. “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 God. 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 Frères, who were found in the cellars an hour
