"A bas les Prussiens! Nous sommes Anglais," shouted Kenneth again, folding his arms and trying his level best to appear calm.
A stick, hurled by a woman's hand, missed his head and struck him heavily upon the shoulder. At almost the same time Rollo was hit by a broken brick, the missile striking him in the ribs.
"Tenez!" thundered an authoritative voice. "Let us show these vile Uhlans that Belgians are civilized. We will give them a fair trial, and shoot them afterwards."
"Anything for a respite," thought Kenneth. Even in this moment of peril the Belgian speaker's idea of a fair trial tickled his sense of humour.
The man who had intervened was a short, thickset fellow, with lowering eyebrows and a crop of closely-cut hair. He was dressed in black, while round his waist was a shawl, evidently intended for a badge of office. He had donned it in such a hurry that the loops of the bows had come undone and were trailing in the dust.
Grasped by a dozen toil-hardened hands, and surrounded by the rest of the survivors of the justly exasperated inhabitants, the two lads were hurried towards the village.
"I wish we had kept on our uniforms under these, old man," said Rollo. "We've nothing to prove our identity."
"They're speaking in German. That proves their guilt," announced one of their captors.
Neither Kenneth nor Rollo attempted to deny the statement—somewhat unwisely, for their unsophisticated guards took silence as an expression of assent to the accusation.
The military passes provided by the Belgian Government had been destroyed—Rollo's, when captured at Cortenaeken; Kenneth's, when the lads made their hitherto beneficial exchange of uniforms. As Rollo had remarked, they possessed nothing that they could produce to prove their identity.