Below them stretched a broad valley, and as far as the eye could reach, it was dotted with flaring fires.
"The German army!" said the girl, and the two stood staring.
Evidently a countless host lay camped below them, but no sound reached them, save the occasional rumble of a train along some distant track. The Kaiser's legions were sleeping until the dawn should give the signal for the advance—an advance which would be as the sweep of an avalanche, hideous, irresistible, remorseless, crushing everything in its path.
"Oh, look, look!" cried the girl, and caught him by the arm.
To the west, seemingly quite near, a flash of flame gleamed against the sky, then another and another and another, and in a moment a savage rumble as of distant thunder drifted to their ears.
"What is it?" asked Stewart, staring at the ever-increasing bursts of flame. "Not a battle, surely!"
"It is the forts at Liège!" cried the girl, hoarsely. "The Germans are attacking them, and they resist! Oh, brave little Belgium!"
The firing grew more furious, and then a battery of searchlights began to play over the hillside before the nearest fort, and they could dimly see its outline on the hilltop—strangely like a dreadnaught, with its wireless mast and its armored turrets vomiting flame. Above it, from time to time, a shell from the German batteries burst like a greenish-white rocket, but it was evident that the assailants had not yet got their guns up in any number.
Then, suddenly, amid the thunder of the cannon, there surged a vicious undercurrent of sound which Stewart knew must be the reports of machine-guns, or perhaps of rifles; and all along the slope below the fort innumerable little flashes stabbed upward toward the summit. Surely infantry would never attack such a position, Stewart told himself; and then he held his breath, for, full in the glare of the searchlights, he could see what seemed to be a tidal wave sweeping up the hill.
A very fury of firing came from the fort, yet still the wave swept on. As it neared the fort, what seemed to be another wave swept down to meet it. The firing slackened, almost stopped, and Stewart, his blood pounding in his temples, knew that the struggle was hand to hand, breast to breast. It lasted but a minute; then the attacking tide flowed back down the hill, and again the machine-guns of the fort took up that deadly chorus.