Wandering pigs were grunting in the long street, and big-eyed little children, now that the roar of war had ceased, were playing merrily among the ruins and finding all sorts of oddments half burned in the débris. One, evidently a humourist, had put on the spiked helmet of a dead German, and was striking comic attitudes, to the delight of his playfellows. His head being completely buried in the canvas-covered helmet, he presented a most ludicrous appearance.
“Let us find M’sieur Labarre, mother,” suggested Aimée, for she knew the place well, as they had often been her uncle’s guests at the now ruined château.
“Yes,” murmured the Baronne. “I feel so very faint, dear, that I really can go no farther?” And, indeed, the poor woman, refined and cultured, having tramped all through that terrible night in her thin shoes, and having been challenged so constantly by soldiers in the darkness—each challenge being a fright lest it be that of the enemy—she was entirely exhausted and unnerved.
Labarre was a farmer, who held some land belonging to Aimée’s unde, and it was not long before they entered his modest house—a long, ugly, grey-slated place surrounded by haystacks and outhouses.
Labarre, a stout, ruddy-faced man, of middle age, in a blue linen blouse, typical of the Walloon farmer, welcomed the poor ladies warmly and in great surprise, and soon they were in the hands of his stout wife, Elise, and were drinking cups of hot bouillon, for, in the farms of the Ardennes, the stock-pot is usually simmering upon the fire.
The long, old-fashioned room, with its heavy beams, its stone-paving, its row of copper cooking-utensils shining in the sun, and its wide chimney and wooden chairs was, indeed, a haven of rest after the terrors of that night.
And while they drank the bouillon, the fat farmer lifted his hands as he told them the story of the German occupation.
“Ah! Baronne! It was terrible—very terrible,” he cried in his Walloon dialect. “Those pigs of Germans came here, took all the corn I had, smashed my piano and thieved two of my horses. But the brave English drove them out. We fled when the English shells began to fall, but, fortunately, not one did any damage to our house, though the big barn was set on fire with two haystacks, and destroyed.”
Having remained under the farmer’s hospitable roof for a day, Aimée, who had now completely recovered, resolved to leave her mother in Madame Labarre’s charge, and endeavour to reach Dinant where, it was said, the telephone with Brussels had been repaired. By that means she could, she hoped, communicate with her father, and ascertain what they should do.
The British soldiers in khaki were now in possession of Bourseigne, and that communication was open from Dinant to Brussels, Aimée had learnt from a lieutenant of the Gloucesters, a good-looking young fellow named Dick Fortescue, whom she had met in the little Place having some trouble with the Walloon language in a purchase of fodder he was making, and had offered to interpret.