THE TRENCH DAYS: The Collected War Tales of William Le Queux (WW1 Adventure Sagas, Espionage Thrillers & Action Classics). William Le Queux
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to my gun.” And he kissed her again breathlessly, saying, “Good-bye, darling — till to-morrow.”
Once more the heavy guns upon the citadel flashed and roared. No time was now to be lost.
“We are attacked again?” cried Valentin. “Run along to the Epée! You will be safe there. Run quickly!” — and he kissed her in hasty farewell. Then they parted.
She had only a couple of hundred yards to go to gain the old-fashioned inn. He watched her disappear around the corner, then, as fast as his legs could carry him, he ascended the hill-side to where his men, posted with their machine-gun, were already firing.
By this time, however, the whole town was agog. The alarm signals had aroused everyone. It was, indeed, an awful nightmare. The barbaric enemy were again upon them for a second time!
A German armoured motor-car had suddenly swept down the Rue St. Jacques — which ran behind the Rue Grande — and was firing with its machine-gun into the windows of houses without warning or provocation.
Behind it, rode a large body of Uhlans, who at once ran through, with their lances, those of the peaceful inhabitants who opened their doors to ascertain the cause of the firing.
Aimée succeeded in gaining the door of the ancient inn only just in time, knocking frantically, and obtaining admittance, while Uncle François, recognising her, was at once eager for information as to what had happened to the Baron. At the moment the girl entered the shelter of the house, bullets were already sweeping up the streets.
Dinant had been attacked suddenly by a force under Lieutenant-Colond Beeger, one of the most arrogant Huns of the Kaiser — a monster, who dealt death upon defenceless women and children, and who had been sent by his superiors to repeat the “frightful examples” of Aerschot and of Visé. The sharp, relentless talons of the Prussian eagle had, alas! been set into the little place, peaceful, quiet, and unoffending as it had always been throughout the ages.
Within five minutes the town arose from its silence to a pandemonium of noise. Edmond, who had climbed up the four hundred steps leading to the citadel to his machine-gun, saw but little of the Dantean scene below. His pom-pom was now spitting death down into the Grand Place, but suddenly he slackened the fire in fear lest he might be sending to the grave any of those brave Dinantais, whom he could not distinguish from the enemy in the darkness.
Meanwhile, Aimée stood in the great cellars of the Hotel of the Sword, huddled with a hundred others of all ages and all classes, and fearing for her lover in that violent storm which had so suddenly burst upon them.
How would it end? What could the end be?
Chapter Fourteen
Held by the Enemy
The long, narrow street was being swept by a hail of lead. Once again was Dinant stricken.
The Germans — ordered by the assassin who led them — were firing indiscriminately into the houses as they rode along.
A woman sleeping in the top room of the hotel was killed, while, in the next house, a poor little child was mortally wounded, and died in its mother’s arms. Those who opened their doors, startled at the commotion, were all ruthlessly shot down. The marauders, more savage than the warriors of the Khalifa, spared nobody.
Aimée, seated upon a mouldy wine-barrel in the stuffy cellar amid that crowd of terrified women, listened to the firing, keenly apprehensive of Edmond’s fate. That sudden and unexpected meeting now seemed to her like some strange dream.
Hiding there, she knew not the savage, awful acts that were being committed by the Kaiser’s assassins, acts which were but the prelude of a reign of terror.
“Do not be distressed, Mademoiselle,” urged old Uncle François, 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 François 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 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