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

“You speak harshly,” he growled. “If you do not have a care, you shall pay for this?”

“I will. I would rather die here now, than become the wife of a low, cunning spy, who has posed as one of ourselves while he has been in secret relation with the enemy all the time. I hate you, Arnaud Rigaux —I hate you!” shrieked the girl. “Do your worst to me! The worst cannot be worse than death – and even that I prefer, to further association with one who wears the Prussian uniform, and who is leading the enemy into our country. Your cultured friends have burned and sacked Sévérac. Let them sack the whole of Belgium if they will, but our men have still the spirit to defend themselves, just as I have to-day. I defy you, clever, cunning spy that you are. Hear me?” she cried, her white teeth set, her head low upon her shoulders, and her hands clenched as she stood before him, half crouched as a hunted animal ready to spring. “You men who make war upon women may try and crush us, but you will never crush me. Go, and escape in your car if you will. Pass through the Belgian lines back to Brussels. But, though only a defenceless girl, I am safer even in the hands of this barbarian enemy than in the hands of a traitor like you?”

“Very well, girl – choose your own fate,” laughed the man roughly. “You refuse to go with me – eh?”

“Yes,” she said. “I refuse. I hate the sight of your treacherous face. Already I have told my father so.”

“Your father is no longer a person to be regarded,” the man declared. “He is already ruined financially. I have seen to that, never fear. You are no longer the daughter of Baron de Neuville, but the daughter of a man whom this war has brought to ruin and to bankruptcy. It should be an honour to you, daughter of a ruined man, that I should offer you marriage.”

“I am engaged to marry Edmond Valentin,” she replied.

“Bah! a mere soldier. If he is not already dead he soon will be. Germany flicks away the Belgian army like so many grains of sawdust before the wind.”

“No. Edmond is honest and just. He will live,” she cried. “And you, the spy and traitor, will die an ignoble death!”

“Well,” he laughed defiantly. “We shall see all about that, Mademoiselle. We have been long preparing for this coup– for the destruction of your snug little kingdom, and now we are here we shall follow Bismarck’s plan, and not leave your country even their eyes to weep with. It will be swept from end to end – and swept still again and again, until it is Belgian no longer, but German – part of the world-empire of our great Kaiser.”

The fellow did not further disguise that he was a German agent – he who had posed as a patriotic Belgian, was there in Dinant, dressed in Prussian uniform.

The trembling girl stood amazed. The ghastly truth was, to her, one horrible, awful nightmare.

“Your great Kaiser, as you call him, does not intimidate me,” she replied boldly. “Go, Arnaud Rigaux, and leave me to my fate, whatever you decide it to be. I will never accept the friendly offices of a man who is a traitor and a spy.”

Rigaux bit his lip. Those were the hardest words that had ever been spoken to him. He had been on a mission into the German lines, and only by pure chance had he recognised her with Valentin, standing in the Place on the previous night.

His cunning brain was already working out a swift yet subtle revenge. Aimée had attracted him, and he had marked her down as his victim by fair means or by foul. But her defiance had now upset all his calculations. To his surprise she preferred death itself, to the renunciation of her vow to Edmond Valentin.

He hesitated. He held her in his relentless hands. That she knew. Death was to be her fate, and she stood, with pale face, bold and defiant – prepared to meet it.

Chapter Sixteen.

The Fire of Fate

Outside in the streets could be heard the sound of rifle-fire, while the air was filled with the pungent odour of powder, and of burning wood.

The whole town had, by that time, become a veritable hell. Not far along the street, indeed in sight of the Hotel of the Sword, forty or so innocent men – honest workers at a neighbouring factory – had been drawn up against a wall. The front row was ordered to kneel, with their hands up, the others remaining standing behind them. A platoon of soldiers suddenly drew up in face of these unhappy men, with their rifles ready. In vain did the frantic women beg for mercy for their sons, husbands, and brothers. But the officer, grinning, ordered his men to fire. Some fell forward, dead, others were only slightly wounded. But the soldiers, to make sure, fired three volleys into that heap of men in their death throes. Such fell, hellish work had been ordered “as examples” by the glittering War Lord – the man who declared that God was his guide in his arrogant desire to rule the world. Those poor fellows were, even while their bodies were still warm, thrown into a pit dug in a neighbouring garden.

Further up the same street, a poor old paralytic was shot in his invalid-chair, together with a bright little boy of twelve, and their bodies were kicked aside into a doorway, while, at the same time, a man of sixty-five, his wife, his son and his daughter, were set up against the wall of their burning house and shot. And none of them had committed any crime!

Here and there were loud explosions. The soldiers, who had pillaged the cafés and drunk indiscriminately all they could find, were blowing open the safes of merchants and shopkeepers with dynamite, and stealing all they could discover. They were mere brigands.

The Faubourg de Leffe, near the broken viaduct of the railway, was already in flames. Soldiers were using their inflammable confetti provided them by the Fatherland, which they were sprinkling everywhere, for the monster in command had given the order that Dinant, after being sacked, and its people massacred, should be burnt.

As the slim, pale-faced girl stood facing her father’s false friend, she could hear the wild shrieks of the defenceless women outside – those poor creatures dragged forth to witness the heartless murder of those dearest to them.

“Well,” Rigaux asked again, with an evil grin upon his face. “So you are quite decided – eh?”

“I am quite decided, m’sieur, that you are my bitterest enemy,” was her hard, defiant answer. “I have been caught here, helpless. But I have no hope, therefore I have no fear. To whatever fate you, as spy of the accursed Kaiser of Germany, may condemn me, I am quite prepared.”

For a few seconds he remained silent. Her coolness and bold defiance, in face of that awful scene, absolutely staggered him. He never credited her with such nerve.

“But will you not accept my offer, and escape with me?”

“No. I will not accept the assistance of one who has openly confessed himself to be a traitor,” she responded.

“But you cannot remain here – you will be killed – perhaps even meet with a worse fate. You do not know what awful scenes are in progress in Dinant at this moment,” he said. “The soldiers are collecting up the people, men, women, and children, and mowing them down with their machine-guns. You cannot remain here while this awful work of destruction, theft, and incendiarism is in progress!”

“And whose work, pray, is this? It is men such as you who are responsible – men who have sold Belgium into her enemy’s hands,” she cried bitterly, her big eyes glaring at him in her woman’s undisguised hatred.

“Merely the fortunes of war, Mademoiselle,” he replied with a smile, as he shrugged his shoulders, quite unperturbed by her violent denunciation.

“Then go, and leave me to face this terrible fate to which I have been consigned. Shoot me with that revolver I see you have in your belt,” she cried wildly. “Shoot me, if you will. I am quite ready.”

But he grinned horribly in her face – the grin of a man who intended a demoniacal revenge.

She knew herself to be defenceless – utterly helpless in his hands. Men and women of Dinant, known to her from childhood, lay stiffening in death in that narrow street wherein hell had been let loose by the orders of the arrogant War Lord – that pinchbeck Napoleon who dangled his tin crosses before his troops to incite them to deeds of barbarism, which were afterwards magnified and distorted into those of valour.

“No,” the man laughed. “If you, as daughter of the Baron de Neuville, still disregard my well-meant efforts to rescue you from this awful abyss of dishonour and death, then I have no more to say. I can only leave you to the same fate as that of the women of the town.”

“No!” shrieked the girl. “Shoot me.” And she stood before him ready to fall beneath the bullet of his revolver. “Shoot me – have mercy upon me and shoot me!”

She felt his hot, foetid breath once again upon her cheek; she heard the report of the rifles outside, the loud, piercing shrieks of defenceless women, the exultant shouts and laughter of the Germans, and the rapid crackling of a machine-gun in the immediate vicinity.

She struggled violently to free herself, but he was the stronger. His sensuous lips were upon hers, his big eyes looked fiercely into hers, while her slim figure was held within his strong, desperate grasp. She saw the evil, wicked look in his eyes.

“Let me go, you brute – you spy of Germany!” she shrieked in French. “Let me go, I say!”

“No, no,” he laughed in triumph. “You are mine —mine! I have brought ruin upon your miserable little country, upon your father, upon your fine château, and now, because you still defy me – I bring it upon you!”

“Bien! And what do you intend?” she asked.

“I intend to take you out yonder, into the street, and to hand you over to the tender mercies of those most unpolite troops of Germany – the Bavarians. There are three thousand in the town, and they are having a really reckless time – I can assure you.”

“You hell-scoundrel!” cried the poor girl in her frantic, almost insane terror. “You – you who have sat at our table and eaten with us – you, whom my father has trusted, and to whom my mother has sent presents at Noël. Ah! I now see you unmasked, yet you – ”

“Enough!” cried the fellow, springing upon her and putting his thick, loose lips to hers. “A last kiss, and then you go to the late which every Belgian woman goes to-day where our Kaiser and his troops are victorious,” and he kissed her though she still struggled fiercely to evade his grasp.

Suddenly both started, for in the room sounded a loud deafening report.

Aimée started and drew back, breathless and shocked, for from that hated face thrust into hers, before her, one eye disappeared. The hateful face receded, the body reeled and suddenly falling backward, rolled over the stone flags of the kitchen.

A bullet had entered the eye of Arnaud Rigaux, and, passing through his brain, had taken away a portion of his skull, causing instant death. That left eye, as he reeled and fell backwards, was blotted out, for it was only a clot of blood.

“Aimée!” shouted a voice.

The girl, startled, turned to encounter a man in a grey uniform – a German infantryman! He wore a small round grey cap, and in its front the little circular cockade of blue and white – the mark of the Bavarian.

“Aimée!”