As yet he could not quite realize what had happened. Suddenly followed realization.
A night raiding aircraft had spied the shifting lights of the encampment and, by the moonlight, caught the gleam of stacked arms, and had struck.
The sound of the sentries' ceaseless pacing had stopped. Jack shouted and pounded on the door of the partially wrecked smoke house, but there was no answer but the moans and cries that were now getting fainter and less frequent. The sides of the smoke house were of rough logs and without much difficulty Jack clambered to the shattered roof.
He raised himself and clambering over, gave a hasty glance about him. It was a terrible scene of wreckage that he surveyed. In the earth two immense holes, big enough to bury two horses, had been torn, and close by lay two men. Over toward the house was a third figure stretched out. Three horses, one of which died as Jack was looking over the carnage, lay not far off.
Jack clambered over the edge of the gap the shell had torn in the roof and dropped lightly to the ground.
"Wasser!" moaned one of the wounded men, whom Jack recognized as one of his guards. The boy sped to the well and hastened back with the big earthen pitcher from which they had refreshed themselves earlier that day.
But he was too late. Even as the boy held the cooling draught to the sentry's lips, the man died. The other was already dead when the boy dropped to the ground, his body frightfully shattered by the aerial bomb.
There was still the third man lying by the house and Jack, thinking he might be able to minister to him, hurried over. But here, too, the bomb had struck fatally.
A shaft of moonlight fell through the poplars and illumined the man's face. It was Radwig, struck down in death even as he had planned a cruel revenge for another. Jack covered the dead professor's face with the man's huge blue cloak and then stood silent for a moment. The rapidity with which it had all happened almost stunned him.
Fifteen minutes before he had been a prisoner with the hideous sounds of spade and mattock in his ears. Now he was, by nothing short of a miracle, free again. He raised his face to the sky and his lips moved silently. Then, with a last look about the place, he prepared to leave, fervently hoping that before another day had passed he would be with his friends once more in Louvain.