Uncle François and his daughter busied themselves in making coffee for the refugees, poor, frantic women, who dreaded what fate might befall their husbands and brothers. Many of them knelt piously and aloud besought the protection of the Almighty against the barbarians.
Dawn came at last, and with it large masses of German troops swept into the town. Some sharp fighting had occurred along the heights above the Meuse, but during the night the gallant defenders had been driven out of the town, being compelled to fall back along the wide valley towards Namur.
Edmond Valentin worked his gun valiantly, with a fierce, dogged determination not to leave Aimée in the hands of the brutal soldiery.
But it was all to no purpose. The order was given to retire, and he was compelled to withdraw with his comrades under cover of darkness.
“The pigs shall die?” he muttered fiercely to himself. He clenched his teeth, and, even after the order to “cease fire,” he still worked his Maxim, mowing down a squad of twenty or so German infantrymen who had just entered the Place below, at the spot where he and Aimée had stood together only a short time before.
Aimée was down there, in that stricken town! Could he thus abandon her to her fate!
He blamed himself for advising her to go to the house of Uncle François. She should have kept on the road towards Namur, for had she done so, she would have now been beyond the danger zone.
A shrapnel bullet had grazed his left wrist, and around it he had hastily wrapped a piece of dirty rag, which was now already saturated with blood. But in his chagrin at their compulsory retreat, he heeded not his injury. The welfare of the sweet girl, whom he loved more dearly than his own life, was his only thought.
His brigade, thus driven from their position, withdrew in the darkness over the hills to behind the village of Houx, where the long railway-bridge crossing the Meuse, destroyed a few days ago by the defenders, was now lying a wreck of twisted ironwork in the stream. There they took up a second defensive position.
But meanwhile in Dinant the Germans, filled with the blood-lust of triumph, and urged on by their cultured “darlings” of Berlin drawing-rooms—those degenerate elegants who were receiving tin crosses from their Kaiser because of the “frightful examples” they were making—were now committing atrocities more abominable even than those once committed in Bulgaria, and denounced by the whole civilised world.