After a half-mile of rapid progress Dalroy judged that they were safe for the time, and allowed Madame Joos to take a much-needed rest. Though breathless and nearly spent, she, like the others, found an irresistible fascination in the scene lighted by the burning trees. The whole countryside was resplendent in crimson and silver, because the landscape was now steeped in moonshine, and the deep glow of the fire was most perceptible in the patches where ordinarily there would be black shadows. The Meuse resembled a river of blood, the movement of its sluggish current suggesting the onward roll of some fluid denser than water. Old Joos, whose tongue was seldom at rest, used that very simile.
"Those cursed Prussians have made Belgium a shambles," he added bitterly. "Look at our river. It isn't our dear, muddy Meuse. It's a stream in the infernal regions."
"Yes," gasped his wife. "And listen to those guns, Henri! They beat a sort of _roulade_, like drums in hell!"
This stout Walloon matron had never heard of Milton. Her ears were not tuned to the music of Parnassus. She would have gazed in mild wonder at one who told of "noises loud and ruinous,"
When Bellona storms With all her battering engines, bent to raze Some capital city.
But in her distress of body and soul she had coined a phrase which two, at least, of her hearers would never forget. The siege of Liège did, indeed, roar and rumble with the din of a demoniac orchestra. Its clamour mounted to the firmament. It was as though the nether fiends, following Moloch's advice, were striving,
Arm'd with Hell flames and fury, all at once, O'er Heaven's high towers to force resistless way.
Dalroy himself yielded to the spell of the moment. Here was red war such as the soldier dreams of. His warrior spirit did not quail. He longed only for the hour, if ever the privilege was vouchsafed, when he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the men of his own race, and watch with unflinching eye those same dread tokens of a far-flung battle line.
Irene Beresford seemed to read his passing mood. "War has some elements of greatness," she said quietly. "The pity is that while it ennobles a few it degrades the multitude."
With a woman's intuition, she had gone straight to the heart of the problem propounded by Teutonism to an amazed world. The "degradation" of a whole people was already Germany's greatest and unforgivable offence. Few, even the most cynical, among the students of European politics could have believed that the Kaiser's troops would sully their country's repute by the inhuman excesses committed during those first days in Belgium. At the best, "war is hell"; but the great American leader who summed up its attributes in that pithy phrase thought only of the mangled men, the ruined homesteads, the bereaved families which mark its devastating trail. He had seen nothing of German "frightfulness." The men he led would have scorned to ravage peaceful villages, impale babies on bayonets and lances, set fire to houses containing old and bedridden people, murder hostages, rape every woman in a community, torture wounded enemies, and shoot harmless citizens in drunken sport. Yet the German armies did all these things before they were a fortnight in the field. They are not impeached on isolated counts, attributable, perhaps, to the criminal instincts of a small minority. They carried out bestial orgies in battalions and brigades acting under word of command. The jolly, good-humoured fellows who used to tramp in droves through the Swiss passes every summer, each man with a rucksack on his back, and beguiling the road in lusty song, seemed to cast aside all their cheerful camaraderie, all their exuberant kindliness of nature, when garbed in the "field gray" livery of the State, and let loose among the pleasant vales and well-tilled fields of Flanders. That will ever remain Germany's gravest sin. When "the thunder of the captains and the shouting" is stilled, when time has healed the wounds of victor and vanquished, the memories of Visé, of Louvain, of Aershot, of nearly every town and hamlet in Belgium and Northern France once occupied by the savages from beyond the Rhine, will remain imperishable in their horror. German _Kultur_ was a highly polished veneer. Exposed to the hot blast of war it peeled and shrivelled, leaving bare a diseased, worm-eaten structure, in which the honest fibre of humanity had been rotted by vile influences, both social and political.