"They have been driven back!" gasped the girl. "Thank God! the Germans have been driven back!"
How many, Stewart wondered, were lying out there dead on the hillside? How many homes had been rendered fatherless in those few desperate moments? And this was but the first of a thousand such charges—the first of a thousand such moments! There, before his eyes, men had killed each other—for what? The men in the forts were defending their Fatherland from invasion—they were fighting for liberty and independence. That was understandable—it was even admirable. But those others—the men in the spiked helmets—what were they fighting for? To destroy liberty? To wrest independence from a proud little people? Surely no man of honor would fight for that! No, it must be for something else—for some ideal—for some ardent sense of duty, strangely twisted, perhaps, but none the less fierce and urgent!
Again the big guns in the armored turrets were bellowing forth their wrath; and then the searchlights stabbed suddenly up into the sky, sweeping this way and that.
"They fear an airship attack!" breathed the girl, and she and Stewart stood staring up into the night.
Shells from the German guns began again to burst about the fort, but its own guns were silent, and it lay there crouching as if in terror. Only its searchlights swept back and forth.
Suddenly a gun spoke—they could see the flash of its discharge, seemingly straight up into the air; then a second and a third; and then the searchlights caught the great bulk of a Zeppelin and held it clearly outlined as it swept across the sky. There was a furious burst of firing, but the ship sped on unharmed, passed beyond the range of the searchlights, blotted out the setting moon for an instant, and was gone.
"It did not dare pass over the fort," said the girl. "It was flying too low. Perhaps it will come back at a greater altitude. I have seen them at the maneuvers in Alsace—frightful things, moving like the wind."
This way and that the searchlights swept in great arcs across the heavens, in frenzied search for this monster of the air; but it did not return. Perhaps it had been damaged by the gunfire—or perhaps, Stewart told himself with a shiver, it was speeding on toward Paris, to rain terror from the August sky!
Gradually the firing ceased; but the more distant forts were using their searchlights, too. Seeing them all aroused and vigilant, the Germans did not attack again; their surprise had failed; now they must wait for their heavy guns.
"Well," asked Stewart, at last, "what now?"