Part 15 (1/2)
But in her distress of body and soul she had coined a phrase which two, at least, of her hearers would never forget. The siege of Liege did, indeed, roar and rumble with the din of a demoniac orchestra. Its clamour mounted to the firmament. It was as though the nether fiends, following Moloch's advice, were striving,
Arm'd with h.e.l.l flames and fury, all at once, O'er Heaven's high towers to force resistless way.
Dalroy himself yielded to the spell of the moment. Here was red war such as the soldier dreams of. His warrior spirit did not quail. He longed only for the hour, if ever the privilege was vouchsafed, when he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the men of his own race, and watch with unflinching eye those same dread tokens of a far-flung battle line.
Irene Beresford seemed to read his pa.s.sing mood. ”War has some elements of greatness,” she said quietly. ”The pity is that while it enn.o.bles a few it degrades the mult.i.tude.”
With a woman's intuition, she had gone straight to the heart of the problem propounded by Teutonism to an amazed world. The ”degradation” of a whole people was already Germany's greatest and unforgivable offence.
Few, even the most cynical, among the students of European politics could have believed that the Kaiser's troops would sully their country's repute by the inhuman excesses committed during those first days in Belgium. At the best, ”war is h.e.l.l”; but the great American leader who summed up its attributes in that pithy phrase thought only of the mangled men, the ruined homesteads, the bereaved families which mark its devastating trail. He had seen nothing of German ”frightfulness.” The men he led would have scorned to ravage peaceful villages, impale babies on bayonets and lances, set fire to houses containing old and bedridden people, murder hostages, rape every woman in a community, torture wounded enemies, and shoot harmless citizens in drunken sport. Yet the German armies did all these things before they were a fortnight in the field. They are not impeached on isolated counts, attributable, perhaps, to the criminal instincts of a small minority. They carried out b.e.s.t.i.a.l orgies in battalions and brigades acting under word of command. The jolly, good-humoured fellows who used to tramp in droves through the Swiss pa.s.ses every summer, each man with a rucksack on his back, and beguiling the road in l.u.s.ty song, seemed to cast aside all their cheerful camaraderie, all their exuberant kindliness of nature, when garbed in the ”field gray” livery of the State, and let loose among the pleasant vales and well-tilled fields of Flanders. That will ever remain Germany's gravest sin. When ”the thunder of the captains and the shouting” is stilled, when time has healed the wounds of victor and vanquished, the memories of Vise, of Louvain, of Aershot, of nearly every town and hamlet in Belgium and Northern France once occupied by the savages from beyond the Rhine, will remain imperishable in their horror. German _Kultur_ was a highly polished veneer. Exposed to the hot blast of war it peeled and shrivelled, leaving bare a diseased, worm-eaten structure, in which the honest fibre of humanity had been rotted by vile influences, both social and political.
Women seldom err when they sum up the characteristics of the men of a race, and the women of every other civilised nation were united in their dislike of German men long before the first week in August, 1914. Irene Beresford had yet to peer into the foulest depths of Teutonic ”degradation”; but she had sensed it as a latent menace, and found in its stark records only the fulfilment of her vague fears.
Dalroy read into her words much that she had left unsaid. ”At best it's a terrible necessity,” he replied; ”at worst it's what we have seen and heard of during the past twenty-four hours. I shall never understand why a people which prided itself on being above all else intellectual should imagine that atrocity is a means toward conquest. Such a theory is so untrue historically that Germany might have learnt its folly.”
Joos grew uneasy when his English friends spoke in their own language.
The suspicious temperament of the peasant is always doubtful of things outside its comprehension. He would have been astounded if told they were discussing the ethics of warfare.
”Well, have you two settled where we're to go?” he demanded gruffly. ”In my opinion, the Meuse is the best place for the lot of us.”
”In with you, then,” agreed Dalroy, ”but hand over your money to madame before you take the dip. Leontine and Jan may need it later to start the mill running.”
Maertz laughed. The joke appealed strongly.
Madame Joos turned on her husband. ”How you do chatter, Henri!” she said. ”We all owe our lives to this gentleman, yet you aren't satisfied.
The Meuse indeed! What will you be saying next?”
”How far is Argenteau?” put in Dalroy.
”That's it, where the house is on fire,” said the miller, pointing.
”About a kilometre, I take it?”
”Something like that.”
”Have you friends there?”
”Ay, scores, if they're alive.”
”I hear no shooting in that direction. Moreover, an army corps is pa.s.sing through. Let us go there. Something may turn up. We shall be safer among thousands of Germans than here.”
They walked on. The Englishman's air of decision was a tonic in itself.
The fire on the promontory was now at its height, but a curve in the river hid the fugitives from possible observation. Dalroy was confident as to two favourable factors--the men of the marching column would not search far along the way they had come, and their commander would recall them when the wood yielded no trace of its supposed occupants.
There had been fighting along the right bank of the Meuse during the previous day. German helmets, red and yellow Belgian caps, portions of accoutrements and broken weapons, littered the tow-path. But no bodies were in evidence. The river had claimed the dead and the wounded Belgians; the enemy's wounded had been transferred to Aix-la-Chapelle.
Nearing Argenteau they heard a feeble cry. They stopped, and listened.
Again it came, clearly this time: ”Elsa! Elsa!”