The Day of Wrath: A Story of 1914

The priest smiled. He knew where the shoe pinched. Maertz, if no loafer, was not what is vulgarly described as “a good catch.”

“I’ve lost my parish,” he said jestingly, “and, being an inveterate match-maker, am on the qui vive for a job. But if father says ‘No’ we must wait till mother has a word. Now for the other pair. – What of you?”

Irene blushed scarlet, and dropped her serviette; Dalroy, though flabbergasted, happily hit on a way out.

“I’m surprised at you, monsieur!” he cried. “Look at mademoiselle, and then run your eye over me. Did ever pretty maid wed such a scarecrow?”

“I must refer that point to mademoiselle,” retorted the priest. “I don’t think either of you would choose a book by the cover.”

“Ah. At last I know the worst,” laughed Dalroy. “Who would believe that I once posed as the Discobulus in a tableau vivant?”

“What’s that?” demanded Joos.

Dalroy hesitated. Neither his French nor German was equal to the translation.

“A quoit-thrower,” suggested Irene.

“Quoits!” sniffed the miller. “I’ll take you on at that game any day you like for twenty francs every ringer.”

It was a safe offer. Old Joos was a noted player. He gave details of his prowess. Dalroy, though modestly declining a contest, led him on, and steered the conversation clear of rocks.

Thenceforth, for a whole day, Irene’s manner stiffened perceptibly, and Dalroy was miserable. Inexperienced in the ways of the sex, he little dreamed that Irene felt she had been literally thrown at his head.

But graver issues soon dispersed that small cloud. On Saturday, 15th August, the thunder of the guns lessened and died down, being replaced by the far more distant and fitful barking of field batteries. But the rumble on the cobbles of the main road continued. What need to ask what had happened? Around Liège lay the silence of death.

Late that afternoon a woman brought a note to Dalroy. It bore no address. She merely handed it to him, and hurried off, with the furtive air of one afraid of being asked for an explanation. It ran:

“Dear Friend, – Save yourself and the others. Lose not a moment. I have seen a handbill. A big reward is offered. My advice is: go west separately. The messenger I employ is a Christian, but I doubt the faith of many. May God guard you! I shall accompany you in my thoughts and prayers. – E. G.”

Dalroy found Joos instantly.

“What is our curé’s baptismal name?” he inquired.

“Edouard, monsieur.”

“He has sent us marching orders. Read that!”

The miller’s wizened face blanched. He had counted on remaining in Verviers till the war was over. At that date no self-respecting Belgian could bring himself to believe that the fighting would continue into the winter. The first comparative successes of the small Belgian army, combined with the meteoric French advance into Alsace, seemed to assure speedy victory by the Allies. He swore roundly, but decided to follow the priest’s bidding in every respect save one.

“We can’t split up,” he declared. “We are all named in the laisser passer. You understand what dull pigs these Germans are. They’ll count heads. If one is missing, or there’s one too many, they’ll inquire about it for a week.”

Sound common-sense and no small knowledge of Teuton character lurked in the old man’s comment. Monsieur Garnier, of course, had not been told why this queerly assorted group clung together, nor was he aware of the exact cause of their flight from Visé. Probably the handbill he mentioned was explicit in names and descriptions. At any rate, he must have the strongest reasons for supposing that Verviers no longer provided a safe retreat.

Jan Maertz was summoned. He made a good suggestion. The direct road to Andenne, viâ Liège and Huy, was impracticable, being crowded with troops and transports. Why not use the country lanes from Pepinster through Louveigne, Hamoir, and Maffe? It was a hilly country, and probably clear of soldiers. He would buy a dog-team, and thus save Madame Joos the fatigue of walking.

Dalroy agreed at once. Even though Irene still insisted on sharing his effort to cross the German lines, two routes opened from Andenne, one to Brussels and the west, the other to Dinant and the south. Moreover, he counted on the Allies occupying the Mons-Charleroi-Namur terrain, and one night’s march from Andenne, with Maertz as guide, should bring the three of them through, as the Joos family, in all likelihood, would elect to remain with their relatives.

In a word, the orderliness of Verviers had already relegated the excesses of Visé to the obscurity of an evil but half-forgotten dream. The horrors of Louvain, of Malines, of the whole Belgian valley of the Meuse, had yet to come. An officer of the British army simply could not allow his mind to conceive the purposeful criminality of German methods. Little did he imagine that, on the very day the fugitives set out for Andenne, Visé was completely sacked and burned by command of the German authorities. And why? Not because of any fault committed by the unfortunate inhabitants, who had suffered so much at the outbreak of hostilities. This second avalanche was let loose out of sheer spite. By this time the enemy was commencing to estimate the fearful toll which the Belgian army had taken of the Uhlans who provided the famous “cavalry screen.” Over and over again the vaunted light horsemen of Germany were ambuscaded and cut up or captured. They proved to be extraordinarily poor fighters when in small numbers, but naturally those who got away made a fine tale of the dangers they had escaped. These constant defeats stung the pride of the headquarters staff, and “frightfulness” was prescribed as the remedy. The fact cannot be disputed. The invaders’ earliest offences might be explained, if not condoned, as the deeds of men brutalised by drink, but the wholesale ravaging of communities by regiments and brigades was the outcome of a deliberate policy of reprisal. The Hun argument was convincing – to the Hun intellect. How dared these puny Belgians fight for their hearths and homes? It was their place to grovel at the feet of the conqueror. If any worn-out notions of honour and manhood and the sanctity of woman inspired them to take the field, they must be taught wisdom by being ground beneath the heel of the Prussian jack-boot.

If the dead mouths of five thousand murdered Belgians did not bear testimony against these disciplined marauders, the mere journey of the little party of men and women who set out from Verviers that Saturday afternoon would itself dispose of any attempt to cloak the high-placed offenders.

They arranged a rendezvous at Pepinster. Dalroy went alone. He insisted that this was advisable. Maertz brought Madame Joos and Irene. Joos, having been besought to curb his tongue, convoyed Léontine. Until Pepinster was reached, they took the main road, with its river of troops. None gave them heed. Not a man addressed an uncivil word to them. The soldiers were cheery and well-behaved.

They halted that night at Louveigne, which was absolutely unscathed. Next day they passed through Hamoir and Maffe, and the peasants were gathering the harvest!

Huy and Andenne, a villager told them, were occupied by the Germans, but all was quiet. They pushed on, turning north-west from Maffe, and descended into the Meuse valley about six o’clock in the evening. It was ominous that the bridge was destroyed and a cluster of houses burning in Seilles, a town on the opposite, or left, bank of the river. But Andenne itself, a peaceful and industrious place, seemed to be undisturbed. While passing a farm known as Dermine they fell in with a priest and a few Belgians who were carrying a mortally wounded Prussian officer on a stretcher.

Then, to his real chagrin, Dalroy heard that the Belgian outposts had been driven south and west only that morning. One day less in Verviers, and he and the others would have been out of their present difficulties. However, he made the best of it. Surely they could either cross the Meuse or reach Namur next day; while the fact that some local residents were attending to the injured officer would supply the fugitives with an excellent safe-conduct into Andenne, just as a similar incident had been their salvation at Argenteau.

The stretcher was taken into the villa of a well-to-do resident; and, it being still broad daylight, Joos asked to be directed to the house of Monsieur Alphonse Stauwaert. The miller was acquainted with the topography of the town, but the Stauwaert family had moved recently to a new abode.

“Barely two hundred mètres, tout droit,” he was told.

They had gone part of the way when a troop of Uhlans came at the gallop along the Namur road. The soldiers advanced in a pack, and were evidently in a hurry. Madame Joos was seated in the low-built, flat cart, drawn by two strong dogs, which had brought her from Verviers. Maertz was leading the animals. The other four were disposed on both sides of the cart. At the moment, no other person was nearer than some thirty yards ahead. Three men were standing there in the roadway, and they moved closer to the houses on the left. Maertz, too, pulled his team on to the pavement on the same side.

The Uhlans came on. Suddenly, without the slightest provocation, their leader swerved his horse and cut down one of the men, who dropped with a shriek of mingled fear and agony.

Retribution came swiftly, because the charger slipped on some rounded cobbles, crossed its forelegs, and turned a complete somersault. The rider, a burly non-commissioned officer, pitched clean on his head, and either fractured his skull or broke his neck, perhaps achieving both laudable results, while his blood-stained sabre clattered on the stones at Dalroy’s feet. The nearest Uhlans drove their lances through the other two civilians, who were already running for their lives. In order to avoid the plunging horse and their fallen leader, the two ruffians reined on to the pavement. They swung their weapons, evidently meaning to transfix some of the six people clustered around the cart. The women screamed shrilly. Léontine cowered near the wall; Joos, valiant soul in an aged body, put himself in front of his wife; Maertz, hauling at the dogs, tried to convert the vehicle into a shield for Léontine; while Dalroy, conscious that Irene was close behind, picked up the unteroffizier’s sword.

Much to the surprise of the trooper, who selected this tall peasant as an easy prey, he parried the lance-thrust in such wise that the blade entered the horse’s off foreleg and brought the animal down. At the same instant Maertz ducked, and dodged a wild lunge, which missed because the Uhlan was trying to avoid crashing into the cart. But the vengeful steel found another victim. By mischance it transfixed Madame Joos, while the horse’s shoulder caught Dalroy a glancing blow in the back and sent him sprawling.

Some of the troopers, seeing two of their men prone, were pulling up when a gruff voice cried, “Achtung! We’ll clear out these swine later!”

Irene, who saw all that had passed with an extraordinary vividness, was the only one who understood why the order which undoubtedly saved five lives was given. A stout staff officer, wearing a blue uniform with red facings, rode with the Uhlans, and she was certain that he was in a state of abject terror. His funk was probably explained by an irregular volley lower down the street, though, in the event, the shooting proved to be that of his own men. Two miles away, at Solayn, these same Uhlans had been badly bitten by a Belgian patrol, and the fat man, prospecting the Namur road with a cavalry escort, wanted no more unpleasant surprises that evening. Ostensibly, of course, he was anxious to report to a brigade headquarters at Huy. At any rate, the Uhlans swept on.

They were gone when Dalroy regained his feet. A riderless horse was clattering after them; another with a broken leg was vainly trying to rise. Close at hand lay two Uhlans, one dead and one insensible. Joos and Léontine were bending over the dying woman in the cart, making frantic efforts to stanch the blood welling forth from mouth and breast. The lance had pierced her lungs, but she was conscious for a minute or so, and actually smiled the farewell she could not utter.

Maertz was swearing horribly, with the incoherence of a man just aroused from drunken sleep. Irene moved a few steps to meet Dalroy. Her face was marble white, her eyes strangely dilated.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

“No. And you?”

“Untouched, thanks to you. But those brutes have killed poor Madame Joos!”

The wounded Uhlan was stretched between them. He stirred convulsively, and groaned. Dalroy looked at the sword which he still held. He resisted a great temptation, and sprang over the prostrate body. He was about to say something when a ghastly object staggered past. It was the man who received the sabre-cut, which had gashed his shoulder deeply.

“Oh, mon Dieu!” he screamed. “Oh, mon Dieu!”

He may have been making for some burrow. They never knew. He wailed that frenzied appeal as he shambled on – always the same words. He could think of nothing else but the last cry of despairing humanity to the All-Powerful.

Owing to the flight of the cavalry, Dalroy imagined that some body of allied troops, Belgian or French, was advancing from Namur, so he did not obey his first impulse, which was to enter the nearest house and endeavour to get away through the gardens or other enclosures in rear.

He glanced at the hapless body on the cart, and saw by the eyes that life had departed. Léontine was sobbing pitifully. Maertz, having recovered his senses, was striving to calm her. But Joos remained silent; he held his wife’s limp hand, and it was as though he awaited some reassuring clasp which should tell him that she still lived.

Dalroy had no words to console the bereaved old man. He turned aside, and a mist obscured his vision for a little while. Then he heard the wounded German hiccoughing, and he looked again at the sword, because this was the assassin who had foully murdered a gentle, kind-hearted, and inoffensive woman. But he could not demean himself by becoming an executioner. Richly as the criminal deserved to be sent with his victim to the bar of Eternal Justice, the Englishman decided to leave him to the avengers coming through the town.

The shooting drew nearer. A number of women and children, with a few men, appeared. They were running and screaming. The first batch fled past; but an elderly dame, spent with even a brief flurry, halted for a few seconds when she saw the group near the dog-team.

“Henri Joos!” she gasped. “And Léontine! What, in Heaven’s name, are you doing here?”

It was Madame Stauwaert, the Andenne cousin with whom they hoped to find sanctuary.

The miller gazed at her in a curiously abstracted way. “Is that you, Margot?” he said. “We were coming to you. But they have wounded Lise. See! Here she is!”

Madame Stauwaert looked at the corpse as though she did not understand at first. Then she burst out hysterically, “She’s dead, Henri! They’ve killed her! They’re killing all of us! They pulled Alphonse out of the house and stabbed him with a bayonet. They’re firing through the openings into the cellars and into the ground-floor rooms of every house. If they see a face at a bedroom window they shoot. Two Germans, so drunk that they could hardly stand, shot at me as I ran. Ah, dear God!”

She swayed and sank in a faint. The flying crowd increased in numbers. Some one shouted, “Fools! Be off, for your lives! Make for the quarries.”

Dalroy decided to take this unknown friend’s advice. The terrified people of Andenne had, at least, some definite goal in view, whereas he had none. He lifted Madame Stauwaert and placed her beside the dead body on the cart.

“Come,” he said to Maertz, “get the dogs into a trot. – Léontine, look after your father, and don’t lose sight of us!”

He grasped Irene by the arm. The tiny vehicle was flat and narrow, and he was so intent on preventing the unconscious woman from falling off into the road that he did not miss Joos and his daughter until Irene called on Maertz to stop. “Where are the others?” she cried. “We must not desert them.”

In the midst of a scattered mob came the laggards. Joos was not hurrying at all. He was smiling horribly. In his hand he held a large pocket-knife open. “It was all I had,” he explained calmly. “But Margot said Lise was dead, so it did his business.”

“I’m glad,” said Dalroy. “It was your privilege. But you must run now, for Léontine’s sake, as she will not leave you, and the Germans may be on us at any moment.”

Luckily, the stream of people swerved into a by-road; the “quarries” of which some man had spoken opened up in the hillside close at hand. On top were woods, and a cart-track led that way at a sharp gradient. Dalroy assisted the dogs by pushing the cart, and they reached the summit. Pausing there, while Irene and the weeping Léontine endeavoured to revive Madame Stauwaert, to whom they must look for some sort of guidance as to their next move, he went to the lip of the excavation, and surveyed the scene.

Dusk was creeping over the picturesque valley, but the light still sufficed to reveal distances. The railway station, with all the houses in the vicinity, was on fire. Nearly every dwelling along the Namur road was ablaze; while the trim little farms which rise, one above the other, on the terraced heights of the right bank of the Meuse seemed to have burst into flame spontaneously. Seilles, too, on the opposite bank, was undergoing the same process of wanton destruction; but, a puzzling thing, rifles and machine-guns were busy on both sides of the river, and the flashes showed that a sharp engagement was taking place.

A man, carrying a child in his arms, who had come with them, was standing at Dalroy’s elbow. He appeared self-possessed enough, so the Englishman sought information.

“Are those Belgian troops in Seilles?” he inquired.

The man snorted. “Belgians? No! They retreated to Namur this morning. That is a Bavarian regiment shooting at Brandenburgers in Andenne. They are all mad drunk, officers and men. They’ve been here since eleven o’clock, first Uhlans, then infantry. The burgomaster met them fairly, not a shot was fired, and we thought we were over the worst. Then, as you see, hell broke loose!”

Such was the refuge Andenne provided on Monday, 20th August. Hell – by order!

CHAPTER XI

A TRAMP ACROSS BELGIUM

The stranger, a Monsieur Jules Pochard, proved a most useful friend. In the first instance, he was a cool-headed person, who did not allow imagination to run riot. “No,” he said, when questioned as to the chance of reaching Namur by a forced march along country lanes, “every road in that section of the province is closed by cavalry patrols. You cannot avoid them, monsieur. Come with me to Huy, and you’ll be reasonably safe.”

“Why safer in Huy than here, or anywhere else where these brutes may be?”

“Huy has been occupied by the Germans since the 12th, and is their temporary headquarters. From what I gather, they usually spare such towns. That is why we never dreamed of Andenne being sacked.”

Dalroy remembered the aged curé’s exposition of Kultur as a policy. “Is this sort of thing going on generally, then?” he asked.

Monsieur Pochard was a Frenchman. He raised his eyebrows. “Where can you have been, monsieur, not to know what has happened at Liège, Visé, Flemelle Grande, Blagny Trembleur, and a score of other places?”

“Visé!” broke in the cracked, piping voice of Joos. “What’s that about Visé?”

“It is burnt to the ground, and nearly all the inhabitants killed.”

“Is anything said of a fat major named Busch, whom Henri Joos the miller stuck with a fork?”

“A Prussian, do you mean?”

“Ay. One of the same breed – a Westphalian.”

“I haven’t heard.”

“He tried to assault my daughter, so I got him. The second one, a Uhlan, killed my wife, and I got him too. I cut his throat down there in the main street. It’s easy to kill Germans. They’re soft, like pigs.”

Though Joos’s half-demented boasting was highly injudicious, Dalroy did not interfere. He was in a mood to let matters drift. They could not well be worse. He had tried to control the course of events in so far as they affected his own and Irene Beresford’s fortunes, but had failed lamentably. Now, fate must take charge.

Pochard’s comment was to the point, at any rate. “I congratulate you, monsieur,” he said. “I’ll do a bit in that line myself when this little one is lodged with his aunt in Huy. If every Belgian accounts for two Prussians, you’ll hold them till the French and English join up.”

“Do you know for certain where the English are?” put in Dalroy eagerly.

“Yes, at Charleroi. The French are in Namur. Come with me to Huy. A few days, and the sales Alboches will be pelting back to the Rhine.”

For the second time Dalroy heard a slang epithet new to him applied to the Germans. He little guessed how familiar the abbreviated French form of the word would become in his ears. Briton, Frenchman, Slav, and Italian have cordially adopted “Boche” as a suitable term for the common enemy. It has no meaning, yet conveys a sense of contemptuous dislike. Stricken France had no heart for humour in 1870. The merciless foe was then a “Prussian”; in 1914 he became a “Boche,” and the change held a comforting significance.

Dalroy, of course, did not share the Frenchman’s opinion as to the speedy discomfiture of the invader; but night was falling, the offer of shelter was too good to be refused. Nevertheless, he was careful to reveal a real difficulty. “Unfortunately, we have a dead woman in the cart,” he said. “Madame Stauwaert, too, is ill, but she has recovered from a fainting fit, I see.”

“Ah, poor Stauwaert!” murmured the other. “A decent fellow. I saw them kill him. And that’s his wife, of course. I didn’t recognise her before.”

Dalroy was relieved to find that the Frenchman and the bereaved woman were friends. He had not forgotten the priest’s statement that there would be a spy in every group in that part of Belgium. Later he ascertained that Monsieur Pochard was a well-to-do leather merchant in Andenne, who, like many others, refused to abandon a long-established business for fear of the Germans; doubtless he was destined to pay a heavy price for his tenacity ere the war ended. He behaved now as a true Samaritan, urging an immediate move, and promising even to arrange for Madame Joos’s burial. Dalroy helped him to carry the child, a three-year-old boy, who was very sleepy and peevish, and did not understand why he should not be at home and in bed.

Joos suffered them to lead him where they listed. He walked by the side of the cart, and told “Lise” how he had dealt with the Uhlan. Léontine sobbed afresh, and tried to stop him, but he grew quite angry.

“Why shouldn’t she know?” he snapped. “It is her affair, and mine. You screamed, and turned away, but I hacked at him till his wind-pipe hissed.”

Monsieur Pochard brought them to Huy by a rough road among the hills.

It was a dreadful journey in the gloaming of a perfect summer’s evening. The old man’s ghoulish jabbering, the sobs of the women, the panting of two exhausted dogs, and the wailing of the child, who wanted his father’s arms round him rather than a stranger’s, supplied a tragic chorus which ill beguiled that Via Dolorosa along the heights of the Meuse.

Irene insisted on taking the boy for a time, and the youngster ceased his plaint at once.

“That’s a blessed relief,” she confided to Dalroy. “I’m not afflicted with nerves, but this poor little chap’s crying was more than I could bear.”

“He is too heavy that you should carry him far,” he protested.

“You’re very much of a man, Arthur,” she said quietly. “You don’t realise, I suppose, that nature gives us women strong arms for this very purpose.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. The fact is, I’m worried. I have a doubt at the back of my head that we ought to be going the other way.”

“Which other way?”

“In precisely the opposite direction.”

“But what can we do? At what stage in our wanderings up to this very moment could we have parted company with our friends? Do you know, I have a horrible feeling that we have brought a good deal of avoidable misery on their heads? If we hadn’t gone to the mill – ”