War was no longer an eventuality. It was a fact. Already the Kaiser was hurling his legions of Pikelhauben westwards towards the sea. The Teutons had burst their bonds, and Edmond’s prophesy had, alas! proved only to be true. The ambitious Kaiser meant war—war at all hazards and at all costs, in order to retain his imperial crown, and in order to justify, with his clamorous people, his title of the great War Lord of the twentieth century and ruler of the world.
But there had been many War Lords in the world ages before him—Rameses, Herod, Caesar, Attila, and Napoleon. After all, the Kaiser, surrounded by his disgracefully degenerate camarilla, was but a pinchbeck edition of Bonaparte; a monarch who, while holding the outstretched hand of friendship to Great Britain, had been hourly plotting to conquer her. The quintessence of treachery, the zenith of personal egotism existed, with the wildest dreams of avarice, in the heart of that deformed monarch, who was as warped in his brain as in his body. In his gaudy tinsel, and in all his panoply of uniform, and his tin crosses which he believed to be iron, he was but the pliable puppet of the degenerates of Potsdam. He believed himself to be the Sword of God—as he had insanely declared to his troops—and stood as the idol of the people of “kultur” yet tottering upon his pedestal.
His fierce antagonism towards civilisation, as opposed to the Prussian militarism, had been betrayed by his undying words, which would live in history through the ages. The fierce War Lord, in his pitiable arrogance, had actually incited his troops to murder and debauchery by the words he had spoken—words that would be for ever registered against him upon his downfall:
“When you meet the foe you will defeat him,” he had said. “No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Gain a reputation like the Huns under Attila.” That reputation was, apparently, what his hordes were achieving in the burning of Visé and Argenteau. Attila, in his expedition across Greece, reduced seventy of the finest cities to smoking ruins and shambles. He was the black demon of ruin and destruction, and this modern murder-Monarch of the Huns, if that report over the telephone be true, was emulating the blood-guilty ruffian.
Pale and breathless, Aimée de Neuville rushed up the great staircase to relate to her mother the appalling news that Germany had, at last, swept down upon peaceful little Belgium with fire and sword.
The war-cloud had burst! The Kaiser, in his eagerness to plunge Europe into blood, had not waited for Great Britain’s reply. His lustful, grey-coated hordes of braided Uhlans, infantry and artillery, with all their endless streams of lumbering guns, heavy waggons, motor-cars, and loaded motor-lorries, had crossed the frontier, and with the fierceness of hell-hounds let loose, were already sweeping the valley of that peaceful-flowing river which wound below the great Château de Sévérac.
War! War! WAR!
The girl, pale and excited, held her breath as she placed her thin, trembling fingers upon the handle of the door of that room wherein her mother sat in calm ignorance of the awful truth.
War! War! WAR!
And Edmond, the man whom she loved, the man whose last final kiss she still felt upon her brow, had marched into Liège with his regiment, to face the treacherous Germans, to fight for home and freedom, and to stem the great oncoming Teuton tide.