And their corpses had been left to rot where they fell, and the village fired by those little black cubes of a highly inflammable chemical substance, which the brutes carried with them for that one purpose.
The fog of war was over everything.
“It is not warfare, father,” declared Aimée one evening, as she sat with her parents in a big, handsome salon, wherein the last blood-red light of the fiery afterglow was fast fading. “It is massacre. They have just told me, over the telephone, of fearful things that have happened in Aerschot. The Germans have wrecked the beautiful church, smashed the holy statues, desecrated the crucifix, and stabled their horses there. And these are the troops upon whom the Kaiser is beseeching God’s blessing. It is all too awful for words!”
“Yes, child,” replied the grey-haired Baroness, looking up from her embroidery—for in these days of excitement she tried to occupy her mind with her needlework. “The Kaiser respects neither the laws of nations, nor the laws of Almighty God, Whose aid he asks. His evil deeds cry aloud to Heaven, and to us who, horror-struck, are watching.”
“The Emperor is carrying out the policy, which I read yesterday in the Indépendance, advocated by Bismarck,” said the Baron. “The Iron Chancellor laid it down, as a maxim, that true strategy consisted in hitting the enemy hard, and in inflicting on the inhabitants of invaded towns the maximum of suffering, so that they might bring pressure upon their Government to discontinue it. He is declared to have said: ‘You must leave the people through whom you march only their eyes to weep with.’”
“The inhuman brute!” ejaculated the Baroness. “But our dear Belgium will never sue for peace.”
“Never,” declared the Baron fiercely, rising and passing to the window, an erect, refined figure. “We have the British on our side. They will quickly wipe the Germans from the seas, and then come here to our assistance. The speech of Asquith in the House of Commons shows their intentions. Besides, have we not Russia—a colossal power in Europe when she commences to move? So we may rest assured that for every evil and unwarrantable act committed upon our soil, ample vengeance will be exacted when the Cossacks are let loose upon our friends of Berlin.”
“They say that at Liège and in other places, German spies have been discovered,” Aimée remarked. “I hear that at the entrance to Liège, the German soldiers were actually met by spies—hitherto respectable inhabitants of the place—who acted as their guides through the city, and pointed out the principal buildings and the residences of the rich.”
“Exaggerated stories,” declared the Baron. “I do not believe in the existence of German spies in Belgium.”
“But they have arrested many both in Brussels and Antwerp.”