"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 Liege 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 Cha.s.seurs-a-pied pa.s.sed here early this morning, having come poste-haste from Brussels. They have gone along the river-bank. Liege will not suffer much, but the country around is already in flames. It is terrible, Mademoiselle--_terrible_!"

The eighth regiment of Cha.s.seurs-a-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 Vise 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 Prefect, 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 Cha.s.seurs 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! h.e.l.lo!--h.e.l.lo?" 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.

"h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo?" she called. "h.e.l.lo, Liege! h.e.l.lo, Liege!"

The wire was dead--cut, perhaps by a German sh.e.l.l!

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

Their nearest exchange was that at Dinant.

"h.e.l.lo, Dinant! _Dinant_!" she kept repeating. "_h.e.l.lo, 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 employe in Liege 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 t.i.tle 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 G.o.d--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 Vise 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, Aimee 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 l.u.s.tful, 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 h.e.l.l-hounds let loose, were already sweeping the valley of that peaceful-flowing river which wound below the great Chateau de Severac.

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 Liege 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 LIEGE.

At that same moment when Aimee had listened to the dread news over the telephone, Edmond Valentin, in the uniform of a _sous-officier_ of Cha.s.seurs-a-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 Liege, 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 pa.s.sage 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 Liege, while from the left came the eternal rattle of the machine-guns. In that trench, before which the river and the ca.n.a.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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.