Into the big, ill-lit cellar descended a terrified woman who told an awful story. German soldiers were smashing in the doors of every house, and murdering everybody found within.
“My poor husband has just been killed before my very eyes!” shrieked the poor, half-demented creature. “My two children also! The Imites! They stabbed them with their bayonets! I flew, and they did not catch me. They are arresting all women, and taking them up to the Monastery. They will be here soon.”
“Here!” gasped Aimée, her face suddenly white as death. “Surely they will not come here?” she cried.
“They will?” shouted the frantic, half-crazed woman, who had seen her beloved husband fall beneath the bullets of the soldiers ere they, laughingly, set fire to her house. “They will?”
Scarcely had she spoken before a young man, Pierre Fiévet, a nephew of Uncle François, limped down the broken steps into the cellar, wounded in the foot, and, calling the old man aside, said in a low voice in his native Walloon dialect:
“Don’t alarm the women. But the situation outside is fearful.” He was a young doctor, and well known in Dinant. “About sixty workmen at the cotton-mill, together with our friend Himmer, the manager, have just been found in hiding under a culvert,” he added. “They have all been shot—everyone of them. The soldiers are using bombs to set fire to the houses everywhere. It is a raging furnace outside?”
“Dieu!” gasped the old man. “What shall we do?”
“Heaven help us! I do not know,” replied the young doctor. “I only just managed to escape with my life. I saw, only a minute or two ago, in the Place d’Armes, quite two hundred men and boys—old men of seventy-five and boys of twelve, many of whom I knew—drawn up, and then shot down by a machine-gun. Père Jules, our old friend, was among them—and surely he was fully eighty!”
“Holy Jesu! May God place His curse upon these Germans?” cried the old fellow fervently. “As surely as there is a God in heaven, so assuredly shall we be avenged by a Hand which is stronger and more relentless than the Kaiser’s in wreaking vengeance. What else do you know?” he inquired eagerly.
“Xavier Wasseige, manager of the Banque de la Meuse, has been shot, together with his two sons, and Camille Finette and his little boy of twelve have also been murdered. They are wiping out the whole, district of Saint Médart, between the station and the bridge. All is in flames. The soldiers are worse than African savages. The new post-office has been burnt and blown up. It is only a heap of ruins.”