Hence they had remained there, full of hourly anxiety as to what really would be the outcome of it all.
The Baron de Neuville had suggested that his wife and Aimée should flee to England. But while Aimée felt that so long as she remained in Belgium she might at least have a chance of seeing Edmond very soon, the Baroness, on her part, refused to leave her husband’s side, while he, in his responsible position as financial adviser to the Government, could not leave Belgium.
From time to time they received scraps of terrifying news over the telephone from Brussels. Aimée, indeed, each hour rang up her father’s secretary in Brussels, and listened to the latest news from the scene of the fighting.
But, alas! it was a tale of repeated disaster, until she became sick at heart. Of the whereabouts of the Eighth Chasseurs she could glean nothing. She had heard nothing whatsoever of them since they passed through Liège on their way to the front. For aught she knew, they might have shared the same fate as that of other regiments, or been swept out of existence by the terrible fire of the enemy’s machine-guns.
Often she would step out upon the balcony which led from her own room and gave such a wonderful panorama of river and woods, and there she would listen attentively.
Sometimes she fancied she could hear the far-distant booming of the guns. And yet the world about her, warm and sunlit, without a cloud in the brilliant summer sky, seemed so very peaceful. The birds sang merrily, and the peasants, undisturbed after the first days of war, were now garnering in the yellow corn.
The first panic of war had passed, and the dull-eyed Walloons, who composed the major part of the population in that district, clattered along in their wooden sabots and declared that the enemy were going straight on towards Brussels. They would never come near them.
They were unaware as yet of the frightful deeds being done beyond Liège in those warm summer days, acts of merciless savagery and every refinement of cruelty which degenerate minds, filled with the blood-lust of war, could conceive. They knew not of the dastardly practice, made by the Kaiser’s “cultured” troops, of placing before them innocent women and children to act as a living screen, in the hope that the Allies would not, from motives of humanity, fire upon them.
The whole world was being thrilled and shocked by the unspeakable acts of these blonde beasts who, at the behest of their arrogant Kaiser, had simply become hordes of savages, and whose atrocious acts could only be compared with those of the troops of African wilds. But in Belgium little was known of it all, save in the devastated villages themselves, and by Monsieur Carton de Wiart, the Minister of Justice in Brussels, who was preparing an official report to present to the Powers.
The hideous atrocities perpetrated during that bloody fortnight, from August 6th to the 20th, during which the country north of Liège was being swept by fire and sword, were being hidden from the gallant little nation.