This Word of the Uhlan.
The German tidal-wave was steadily advancing. Prussia had set her heel upon Belgium.
A perfect horde of jack-booted Uhlans had swarmed over the country, and had already made themselves hated by their mad, murderous acts of cruelty and pillage. They were—as the blasphemous Kaiser had intended they should be when making his plans at Potsdam—agents of the Terror. Of the nineteen regiments of them in the German army, no fewer than fourteen were being employed to terrorise the inoffensive villagers of poor little Belgium; yet so bravely did the Belgian army fight that within twelve days the larger part of this force, in their gaily-braided uniforms and carrying their ready lances—upon which they sometimes impaled children—were either killed, wounded, or held prisoners. These brutes, who had boasted of their “kultur,” and commanded by noblemen, had been sent out to live upon the country; but they had been entrapped everywhere, and revenged themselves by acts of the most fiendish and horrible cruelty unequalled in modern history.
The Uhlans! As in the war of 1870, so now in Belgium, their very name struck terror into the hearts of the hard-working, thrifty people of Eastern Belgium.
Therefore it was hardly surprising when, one evening a week after Dinant had been stormed, Aimée, who had just ascended to her room to tidy her hair prior to sitting down to dinner with her mother, should stand white-faced and aghast when Mélanie, her dark, good-looking femme-de-chambre, burst in, crying:
“Ah, Mademoiselle, it is terrible—terrible! The Uhlans are here! They are already in the château, asking for M’sieur le Baron!”
“The Uhlans here!” she gasped, in an instant pale to the lips. “What can they want?”
“Mon Dieu! Who knows? I hope they will not kill us all?” cried the trembling maid, her face pale and scared. “I have just seen Gustave talking excitedly with two soldiers down in the great hall, while outside, in the outer courtyard, there are a lot of horses.”
Aimée dashed from her pretty chintz-hung room, across to a spare room at the rear of the château, and looking down, saw, in the falling twilight, a number of horses champing their bits in the big, paved courtyard, while heavily-booted and spurred Uhlans, in their grey service uniforms, were standing astride in groups, talking and laughing.
She held her breath. She and her mother were alone and defenceless, the Baron being in Brussels. What could they do? How should they act?