At the Sign of the Sword: A Story of Love and War in Belgium

As she spoke, Mélanie, Aimée’s French maid, entered the room, saying:

“A gentleman wishes to speak to M’sieur le Baron on the telephone. Will you speak, Mademoiselle?” she asked.

“Who is he?”

“The name he gave was Huart, Mademoiselle.”

“Huart,” exclaimed the Baroness. “That is surely the name of the manager of the Sirault Ironworks at Liège. Go and speak to him, Aimée.”

The girl descended to her father’s small business-room situated in the base of one of the round-slated turrets of the castle, and took up the telephone-receiver from the table.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Is the Baron there?” demanded a man’s rough voice.

“No, m’sieur. But I am Mademoiselle de Neuville. Can I give him any message? He is in Brussels, and will, I think, be here this evening.”

“I am Huart, speaking from the works at Liège. War has broken out.”

“War?” gasped the girl, holding her breath.

“Yes. Eighty thousand Germans are advancing towards the river, and we are already defending Liège against them. Terrible fighting is taking place. Hark! Listen to our forts! Can you hear?”

The girl listened, and for the first time heard the thunder of war – a dull, low roar in the receiver.

“That was one of the big guns in Fort Loncin, General Leman is defending the city, but the Germans are burning all the villages around. From my window here I can see the smoke across the river.”

“Oh! this is awful!” the girl cried. “I will telephone to my father and tell him – if I can find him.”

“Yes, Mademoiselle – tell him that I fear the worst. The first reports of the enemy reached here at dawn, and Liège seems to swarm with German spies. A dozen or so were caught signalling to the enemy with flags from the tops of high houses. They have all been shot – outside here, against the wall.”

“They were not Belgians.”

“They posed as such. One of them was one of my foremen. I always believed him to be a Belgian. It is a revelation, Mademoiselle.”

“But can the Germans enter the city?”

“No, Mademoiselle. Last night all the bridges over the river were destroyed.”

And then, even as she listened, a dull roar fell upon her ear. It was Fort Loncin speaking again with its steel throat.

“Please tell the Baron that I shall remain here pending further instructions from the company. We shall hold out here. Soldiers are pouring into the town. The first regiment of the Guides, and the second, fourth, and eighth Chasseurs-à-pied passed here early this morning, having come poste-haste from Brussels. They have gone along the river-bank. Liège will not suffer much, but the country around is already in flames. It is terrible, Mademoiselle —terrible!”

The eighth regiment of Chasseurs-à-pied! Then Edmond Valentin was already at the front! He was with them, along the river-bank!

“But are they killing people?” asked the girl, in frantic excitement.

“I fear they are, Mademoiselle,” replied the voice, dying away slowly, and being succeeded by a loud electrical buzzing. “Reports have just come in that at Visé and Argenteau some townspeople fired at the soldiers, and in consequence the Germans are killing them, and burning down the houses. It is awful.”

“But that can’t really be true,” she cried, “The Germans are surely not savages like that!”

“I fear that the reports are only too true, Mademoiselle. One came over the telephone from the Burgomaster of Cheratte, close to Argenteau. As an eye-witness of fearful atrocities, he reported them to the Préfect, with a request that they be immediately transmitted to the Minister of Justice, in Brussels.”

“But it seems utterly incredible,” the girl declared. “As incredible as the swarms of spies here in the town. To-day, one does not know enemy from friend! But please tell your father that I will speak to him this evening – if the wires are not cut. They are already cut to Maastricht, Verviers, and Aix.”

“Yes, do ring us up, m’sieur, and tell us what is happening,” implored the girl. “Tell me what the Eighth Chasseurs are doing, and where they are. Will you, please? I have a friend in them – an officer.”

“Certainly, Mademoiselle, I will do what I can, and —Mon Dieu!”

The voice broke off short.

“M’sieur! M’sieur Huart! Hello! – hello?” cried the girl in wonder and apprehension.

There was no response, only a slight buzz. She replaced the receiver upon the Instrument, and turned the handle quickly. Then she listened again. All was silence.

“Hello! hello?” she called. “Hello, Liège! Hello, Liège!”

The wire was dead – cut, perhaps by a German shell!

Again and yet again she tried to obtain response to her call.

Their nearest exchange was that at Dinant.

“Hello, Dinant! Dinant!” she kept repeating. “Hello, Dinant!”

But from Dinant there was no reply.

Upon her the blow had fallen. Edmond, so manly and brave, was already at the front – one of the first to go forth against the giant invader of their gallant little nation. Those words from her father’s employé in Liège had conveyed volumes to her.

War was no longer an eventuality. It was a fact. Already the Kaiser was hurling his legions of Pikelhauben westwards towards the sea. The Teutons had burst their bonds, and Edmond’s prophesy had, alas! proved only to be true. The ambitious Kaiser meant war – war at all hazards and at all costs, in order to retain his imperial crown, and in order to justify, with his clamorous people, his title of the great War Lord of the twentieth century and ruler of the world.

But there had been many War Lords in the world ages before him – Rameses, Herod, Caesar, Attila, and Napoleon. After all, the Kaiser, surrounded by his disgracefully degenerate camarilla, was but a pinchbeck edition of Bonaparte; a monarch who, while holding the outstretched hand of friendship to Great Britain, had been hourly plotting to conquer her. The quintessence of treachery, the zenith of personal egotism existed, with the wildest dreams of avarice, in the heart of that deformed monarch, who was as warped in his brain as in his body. In his gaudy tinsel, and in all his panoply of uniform, and his tin crosses which he believed to be iron, he was but the pliable puppet of the degenerates of Potsdam. He believed himself to be the Sword of God – as he had insanely declared to his troops – and stood as the idol of the people of “kultur” yet tottering upon his pedestal.

His fierce antagonism towards civilisation, as opposed to the Prussian militarism, had been betrayed by his undying words, which would live in history through the ages. The fierce War Lord, in his pitiable arrogance, had actually incited his troops to murder and debauchery by the words he had spoken – words that would be for ever registered against him upon his downfall:

“When you meet the foe you will defeat him,” he had said. “No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Gain a reputation like the Huns under Attila.” That reputation was, apparently, what his hordes were achieving in the burning of Visé and Argenteau. Attila, in his expedition across Greece, reduced seventy of the finest cities to smoking ruins and shambles. He was the black demon of ruin and destruction, and this modern murder-Monarch of the Huns, if that report over the telephone be true, was emulating the blood-guilty ruffian.

Pale and breathless, Aimée de Neuville rushed up the great staircase to relate to her mother the appalling news that Germany had, at last, swept down upon peaceful little Belgium with fire and sword.

The war-cloud had burst! The Kaiser, in his eagerness to plunge Europe into blood, had not waited for Great Britain’s reply. His lustful, grey-coated hordes of braided Uhlans, infantry and artillery, with all their endless streams of lumbering guns, heavy waggons, motor-cars, and loaded motor-lorries, had crossed the frontier, and with the fierceness of hell-hounds let loose, were already sweeping the valley of that peaceful-flowing river which wound below the great Château de Sévérac.

War! War! WAR!

The girl, pale and excited, held her breath as she placed her thin, trembling fingers upon the handle of the door of that room wherein her mother sat in calm ignorance of the awful truth.

War! War! WAR!

And Edmond, the man whom she loved, the man whose last final kiss she still felt upon her brow, had marched into Liège with his regiment, to face the treacherous Germans, to fight for home and freedom, and to stem the great oncoming Teuton tide.

Should she tell the Baroness the truth?

For a second the girl, pale with agitation, hesitated. The awfulness of such sudden news might unnerve her. She had a weak heart.

No. She would conceal her knowledge of the awful fact.

She drew a deep breath and, opening the door, entered smiling, as she exclaimed with a wonderfully careless and nonchalant air:

“Oh! the man only wants to talk to father on business, I told him he would be here to-night to dinner.”

Chapter Six.

In the Trenches before Liège

At that same moment when Aimée had listened to the dread news over the telephone, Edmond Valentin, in the uniform of a sous-officier of Chasseurs-à-pied, in his heavy dark-green overcoat and peaked shako, with his bulging haversack upon his back, was kneeling in a hastily dug trench firing steadily across the broad sunlit river, which lay deep in its valley.

On the opposite bank ran the railway from Liège, across the Dutch frontier to Maastricht, and from beyond the line there appeared all along, for miles, light puffs of smoke which betrayed the position of the enemy, who had crossed those picturesque green hills of the frontier, and who were endeavouring to force a passage across the Meuse.

On the right, over the hills where the river wound, could be heard the loud roar of the German guns which had been brought up against Liège, while from the left came the eternal rattle of the machine-guns. In that trench, before which the river and the canal ran parallel, the men on either ride of Edmond uttered no word. They were silent, firing with regularity, fascinated by the novel scene. Most of them had played the war-game at the annual manoeuvres, when one stood up in trenches and laughed in the face of blank cartridge. Yet here was real war. Already more than one of their comrades had fallen on their faces struck by German bullets, and not far away a shell had just burst behind one of their machine-guns.

The din and rattle of it all struck a strange, uncanny note upon that quiet countryside.

For nearly half an hour Edmond had been plugging away with his men, when of a sudden a machine-gun section ran up close to them. Room was made in the trench, and the gun, carried in parts by half a dozen sturdy soldiers, was quickly assembled.

Then, the belt of cartridges having been adjusted, at the word of command the terrible engine of destruction suddenly spat its hail of death across the river.

The onder-officier with the gun laughed gaily to Edmond, saying in Flemish:

“Our friends yonder will not like this – eh?”

“Oy hebt gelyk,” (you are right), laughed Edmond. “But see over there! What is that smoke; there – away to the left?”

“That is Visé,” was the reply, shouted above the rattle of the machine-gun. “The enemy must have set the place on fire – the brutes! Look?”

And as both watched they saw a great column of black smoke rising slowly into the clear, cloudless sky.

“If they cross at the bridge there they will have the road open to them to Tongres and St. Trond – the main road to Brussels. I suppose we are defending it,” said the onder-officier, a man with a red moustache.

“Ja! Let’s hope so,” said Edmond, raising his Mauser rifle mechanically again, and discharging the five cartridges from its magazine.

At that instant the trench was suddenly swept by a perfect hail of lead from across the river, while from over the heights beyond came a Taube aeroplane, which noisily buzzed as it rose higher and higher, and then, out of range, made a complete circle, in order to reconnoitre the defenders’ position. Dozens of men in the trenches raised their rifles and fired at it. But it had already risen high out of harm’s way, and gaily it circled round and round over the line of the Meuse, noting all the Belgian positions on the north bank of the river, and signalling to the enemy from time to time.

The spot where Edmond was stationed with his regiment was situated about eight miles from Liège, and one from Visé. Just to his right was a bridge, which the Belgians had not destroyed, and which the enemy were now protecting from destruction by means peculiar to the “blonde beasts” of the Kaiser.

Placed upon it were two big furniture-vans, which had been hastily daubed in the Belgian colours – red, black, and yellow. And these were filled with Belgian soldiers, prisoners in German hands. By adopting these dastardly methods, they knew that the defenders would not shell the bridge and destroy it.

Edmond’s regiment did not present any picture of uniformity. Some men about him were dressed in the military fashion of thirty years ago – caps with enormous peaks, and wide-flowing capes covering green and yellow uniforms – while others, including himself, were in the dark-green modern uniform which has lately been adopted, and had been served out to those who had hurriedly rejoined the colours. While the enemy were all in the new service kit of greenish-grey cloth, which at a distance was exceedingly difficult to distinguish – with heavy leather boots reaching half-way up their calves – the Belgians marched in garments of all colours, from the sombre black of the carabineers to the bright amaranthe and green of the Guides.

In war some curious sights are seen in the trenches. Close to where Valentin was crouching there knelt a smart lancer, with a basket containing carrier-pigeons strapped to his back like a knapsack. Amid the roar and din the poor birds fluttered about restlessly inside their cage, eager to escape to their homes. But if the brave little Belgian nation lacked uniforms and accoutrements, it never lacked courage. All was a hubbub of hope, and a talk of victory.

“À bas les Alboches!”

“Vive la guerre!” had been shouted from Ostend to Givet, and the spirits of the nation – soldiers and civilians alike – were of the highest, for now that England had declared war, Belgium was fighting the battles of two great nations, France and Britain.

Both French and British soldiers would soon come to their aid, if they could only hold out.

“They will never silence our forts at Liège,” declared the lancer with the pigeons. But just as he uttered the words, Edmond Valentin heard a sound like the shrill yell of a small dog in the distance, and the next second there occurred near them a terrific explosion.

The deadly German artillery were getting the range!

Again and again came the familiar yell, followed by the inevitable crash. A dozen or so men were lying about him, shattered, dead, or dying.

But the pom-pom continued to deal death, slackening only now and then when a fresh belt was adjusted.

Adding to the roar of heavy guns, and quite close to them, lay the hidden fort of Pontisse, while forts Barchon, Evegnèe, and Fleron, on the heists across the river, were thundering and dealing death in the enemy’s ranks. Behind them, to the left, lay three other forts – Liers, Lanlin, and Loncin – defending the city of Liège, and forming a further portion of the ring.

Time after time their huge guns roared, and the very earth quaked. Time after time the enemy across the river were decimated by the terrible fire.

Then, every now and then, the ear was deafened by the loud crackling of musketry, which sounded like the loading of granite blocks into a cart. They were of two pitches, the deeper from the rifles of the infantry, and the sharper from the cavalry carbines. And above it all – above the constant explosions of shrapnel – sounded the regular pom-pom-pom-pom, steady as the tick of a rapid clockwork motor – adding to the deadly fire now sweeping the valley for nearly twenty miles.

Edmond, quite cool and determined, lay there firing away in the direction of the little puffs of grey smoke, which were hardly distinguishable behind the distant railway line. It was his first experience of being under fire, and after the first few minutes he grew quite unconcerned, even though he saw that many of his comrades had, alas! been bowled over. The primeval fury of the male beast bent on fighting, which seizes every man who is called upon to defend his life, had also seized him.

“They say that the French will be at Liège to-night,” remarked the onder-officier with the red moustache, in charge of the machine-gun. “If they are, we will teach those German brutes a lesson. We will – ”

Next instant he reeled and fell forward upon his face. A bullet entering his jaw had passed through his head, carrying with it a large piece of his skull. Death had been instantaneous. With hope of victory upon his lips the brave fellow had passed, in a single second, into that land which lies beyond the human ken.

The four Chasseurs serving the gun stopped and turned him over, but saw at once that he no longer lived.

A few seconds later Edmond heard sharp words of command from his lieutenant, who had crawled along to him, and in obedience he ceased firing his Mauser, took the dead man’s place and assumed charge of the machine-gun, which, within another half-minute, was continuing its work, while the body of the onder-officier was dragged aside.

“Curse the grey devils! They shall pay for that!” cried one of the men fiercely.

Just then, however, there came a lull in the firing. The shells had ceased, and the enemy was slackening in his attack all along the line.

Was the fight subsiding?

A dull, distant roar was heard from Boncelles, where the steel cupolas were rising, and the big guns hurling death at the grey hordes of the Kaiser, and then disappearing. Then silence.

Suddenly another loud crackling of rifles, and again Edmond’s pom-pom recommenced its rapid rhythmic rattle.

More Mausers crackling, the shrill yell of a shell passing over them, and then a blood-red explosion some distance behind them.

Another shouted word of command, and the whole line of rifles were again discharged. It seemed almost as a signal for the fight to recommence, for next moment the attack was renewed with redoubled vigour.

The short, sharp reports of the enemy’s artillery reverberated along the valley, and shells were now exploding unpleasantly near the trenches.

“I thought they had had enough,” growled one of the men to Edmond, in French, “but it seems they haven’t. Bien, we will show the Kaiser and his brigands that we mean defiance. See, over there, m’sieur! They are burning Visé, and Argenteau too! I lived in Visé when a boy. My sister is there now – unless she has escaped into Holland. I pray to God the poor girl has done so.”

“I sincerely hope she has,” Edmond declared. “It surely is no place for a woman down yonder.”

“Ah, mon vieux, they’ve been killing women and children, the savages,” growled another man with set teeth, as he took out a fresh belt of cartridges. “I heard so as we came along from Liège. But I can’t believe it to be true. The Germans are surely not savages, but a cultured race.”

“Culture?” snapped the first man, a somewhat rough, uncouth fellow, plainly of the peasant class. “If they were cultured, as it is said, they would not burn those undefended villages yonder, and massacre the inhabitants as they are doing. It is horrible – awful!”

“Ah, but the massacres are only hearsay,” Edmond remarked.

“No. One man, an eye-witness, has escaped from Visé. He swam the river, told the terrible truth, and the report was telephoned this morning to Brussels. I overheard our captain tell the major as we were on the march here. The Germans have shot down dozens of men and women, and even little children. Some of them have been deliberately burned alive in their homes. That, m’sieur, is the way Germany makes war! But surely that is not war – it is savage butchery, m’sieur. Culture, bah!”

And the man bent again to his gun.

Could those brave Belgians have seen what was, at that moment, happening in those unoffending villages about them, they would surely have left their trenches and, even regardless of the pitiless fire of the enemy, dashed to the rescue of the poor unoffending inhabitants. On that warm, bright sunlit August day, whole villages were being put to the sword by the ruthless soldiery of the Kaiser, upon the flimsy pretext that the villagers, being non-combatants, had fired upon the troops. Yet the truth came out that such massacres of the inhabitants were actually part of the general plan of campaign. The Kaiser had ordered those cold-blooded atrocities for purely strategical considerations. They were not merely the riotous and isolated outbursts of marauding and buccaneering soldiers, but were ordered by Imperial command.

Over there, among those green hillsides sloping to the river, the Teutonic wave had burst its bounds. Fiendish tortures were being inflicted on helpless old men, women, and children. Peaceful villagers were hanged to trees, sometimes stark naked, and their bodies riddled by bullets. Innocent children were savagely sabred by German officers who, only a week before, were strutting in civilised drawing-rooms, the scented and elegant darlings of the ladies of Berlin.

At that hour, while Edmond Valentin crouched beside his newly acquired pom-pom, pouring a deadly fire away across the river, there were being enacted scenes of outrage, plunder, and massacre too terrible even to bear description – scenes in which blood-guilty ruffians of the great War Lord of Germany performed their grim and terrible work, a work so dastardly and inhuman as to have no parallel; atrocious acts actually ordered by the officers themselves, and which would for ever be handed down in history as an indelible blot upon the escutcheon of those blasphemous and barbarous brigands who loved to call their country the Fatherland.

That strip of green, smiling, undulating country between the German frontier and the Meuse, dotted by small prosperous villages, many of them filled by factory-hands and work-people, was that day swept by the fierce fiery hurricane of war, and so suddenly had it all come upon them that most of the people had not had time to realise what war meant ere they found the swaggering Uhlans clattering up the streets, shouting at and insulting the inhabitants, shooting down men, women, and children, and laughing heartily at the panic which their appearance caused.

From where Edmond Valentin was posted he could only see the columns of black smoke as it rose steadily from the farms and villages now burning in all directions. He, like nearly everyone else, disbelieved the stories of murder and mutilation, for they were really in credible. Surely the Kaiser would never treat little Belgium in such a manner after his Empire solemnly guaranteeing its neutrality!

If so, of what use were treaties? Why should anybody’s signature be honoured further, either in business or in social life?

Bang! There was a blood-red flash, the air was filled with blue-grey smoke and a poisonous odour which made one’s eyes smart. For a second, Edmond was staggered by the terrible force of the concussion, for he had been dealt a blow from behind which sent him reeling forward heavily. The air was filled with flying fragments, and he held his breath. It was as though an earthquake had occurred.

Then, when the smoke cleared, he saw a dozen of his comrades lying shattered about him, including two of the men at his gun. Not far away the scorched grass had been torn up, and a great hole showed in the brown earth.

He set his teeth, and bent over the two fallen men. One had been wounded in the stomach by a fragment of the shell, and was writhing on the ground in his death agony, uttering fearful curses upon the enemy and the Kaiser in particular; while the other, after a final convulsive shudder which shook his whole frame and told its own tale to anybody who had been under fire in battle, turned slowly over and then lay quite still.

The shell alas! had only been too truly placed, for not only were a dozen brave fellows lying shattered, but a splinter had also struck the breech of Edmond’s gun, and it had jammed in consequence.