“I remember now,” she murmured. “You left me under a hedge while you crept forward to investigate, and I was silly enough to go off in a dead faint. Did you carry me to the shed?”
“Yes.”
“What a bother I must have been. But the finding of a rifle doesn’t explain a can of milk.”
“The really important factor was the cow,” he said lightly. “Now, young lady, if you can talk you can walk. We have a little farther to go.”
“Have we?” she retorted, bravely emulating his self-control. “I am glad you have fixed on our destination. It’s quite a relief to be in charge of a man who really knows what he wants, and sees that he gets it.”
He led the way, she followed. He had an eye for all quarters, because daylight was coming now with the flying feet of Aurora. But this tiny section of Belgium was free from Germans, for the very good reason that their cohorts already held the right bank of the Meuse at many points, and their engineers were throwing pontoon bridges across the river at Visé and Argenteau.
From the edge of the wood Dalroy looked down on the river, the railway, and the little town itself. He saw instantly that the whole district south of the Meuse was strongly held by the invaders. Three arches of a fine stone bridge had been destroyed, evidently by the retreating Belgians; but pontoons were in position to take its place. Twice already had Belgian artillery destroyed the enemy’s work, and not even a professional soldier could guess that the guns of the defence were only awaiting a better light to smash the pontoons a third time. In fact, barely half-a-mile to the right of the wood, a battery of four 5.9’s was posted on high ground, in the hope that the Belgian guns of smaller calibre might be located and crushed at once. Even while the two stood looking down into the valley, a sputtering rifle-fire broke out across the river, three hundred yards wide at the bridge, and the volume of musketry steadily increased. Men, horses, wagons, and motors swarmed on the roadway or sheltered behind warehouses on the quays.
As a soldier, Dalroy was amazed at the speed and annihilating completeness of the German mobilisation. Indeed, he was chagrined by it, it seemed so admirable, so thoroughly thought-out in each detail, so unapproachable by any other nation in its pitiless efficiency. He did not know then that the vaunted Prussian-made military machine depended for its motive-power largely on treachery and espionage. Toward the close of July, many days before war was declared, Germany had secretly massed nine hundred thousand men on the frontiers of Belgium and the Duchy of Luxembourg. Her armies, therefore, had gathered like felons, and were led by master-thieves in the persons of thousands of German officers domiciled in both countries in the guise of peaceful traders.
Single-minded person that he was, Dalroy at once focused his thoughts on the immediate problem. A small stream leaped down from the wood to the Meuse. Short of a main road bridge its turbulent course was checked by a mill-dam, and there was some reason to believe that the mill might be Joos’s. The building seemed a prosperous place, with its two giant wheels on different levels, its ample granaries, and a substantial house. It was intact, too, and somewhat apart from the actual line of battle. At any rate, though the transition was the time-honoured one from the frying-pan to the fire, in that direction lay food, shelter, and human beings other than Germans, so he determined to go there without further delay. His main purpose now was to lodge his companion with some Belgian family until the tide of war had swept far to the west. For himself, he meant to cross the enemy’s lines by hook or by crook, or lose his life in the attempt.
“One more effort,” he said, smiling confidently into Irene’s somewhat pallid face. “Your uncle lives below there, I fancy. We’re about to claim his hospitality.”