The Baroness then called the footman and gave certain orders that the troopers below should be entertained, while half an hour later Baron von Meyeren, who had suddenly betrayed a sabre-rattling overbearing towards the ladies, sat down at the dinner table with his two younger officers, apparently young fops from Berlin.
The Baroness and her daughter refused to sit at table with their enemies.
The swaggering German Baron did not ask for what he wanted. He simply ordered it from his orderly who stood behind him.
The wine served did not exactly suit his palate, whereupon he told the orderly to go down into the cellars and ascertain what they contained.
“Bring us up some good wine,” he added in German. “The best these people have. They are sure to have something worth drinking. And give the men some also. It will keep up their spirits.”
The two women were sitting at the further end of the long room, watching the weird scene, the three men laughing and eating beneath the zone of light shed by the dozen or so lighted candles.
Soon the orderly returned with six bottles of Baron de Neuville’s choicest champagne. These they opened themselves, and in loud, harsh voices, brutally drank the health of their hostess and her daughter.
Beneath a veneer of polish and culture which that trio of the enemy wore, was a coarseness and brutality which were at once revealed, for they laughed uproariously, gossiping together in German, with coarse remarks, which only Aimée, sitting in silence, understood.
They swallowed the wine in tumblers—the choice wine of Belgium’s great millionaire—and very soon they demanded that the Baroness and her daughter should sit with them at table.
Again they refused, but both women discerned the drunken leers in the eyes of the men, yet believing the assurance of the Uhlan commander, the word of a German nobleman, they were not frightened. Nevertheless the swords those men wore at their sides bore the blood of the innocent people massacred to provide the “frightful examples” which the Kaiser had laughingly given to their brave little nation, which had no quarrel with the bombastic and treacherous monarch who had self-styled himself the War Lord of Europe.