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

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!