"That's a clump of trees just above the Meuse. Visé lies below it."
Two kilomètres! About a mile and a half! Dalroy was tortured by indecision. "Shall we be there by daybreak?"
"With luck. I don't know what's been happening here. These damned Germans are swarming all over the place. They must be making for the bridge."
"The bridge across the Meuse, of course. Don't you know these parts?"
"I wish I were safe at home; I'd get indoors and stop there," growled the driver, chirping his team into motion again.
Dalroy's doubts were stilled. Better leave this rustic philosopher to work out their common salvation.
A few hundred yards ahead the road bifurcated. One branch led to Visé, the other to Argenteau. Here was stationed a picket, evidently intended as a guide for the cavalry.
Most fortunately Dalroy read aright the intention of an officer who came forward with an electric torch. "Lie as flat as you can!" he whispered to Irene. "If they find us, pretend to be asleep."
"Hi, you!" cried the officer to Maertz, "where the devil do you think you're going?"
"To Joos's mill at Visé," said the gruff Walloon.
"You just pull ahead into that road there. I'll attend to you and your oats in a minute or two."
The officer called to a soldier. "See that this fellow halts twenty yards up the road," he said. "If he stirs then, put your bayonet through him. These Belgian swine don't seem to understand that they are Germans now, and must obey orders."
The officer, of course, spoke in German, the Walloon in the mixture of Flemish and Low Dutch which forms the _patois_ of the district. But each could follow the other's meaning, and the quaking listeners in the middle of the wagon had no difficulty at all in comprehending the gravity of this new peril.
Maertz was swearing softly to himself; they heard him address a question to the sentry when the wagon stopped again. "Why won't your officer let us go to Visé?" he growled.
"Sheep's-head! do as you're told, or it will be bad for you," was the reply.
The words were hardly out of the soldier's mouth before a string of motor lorries, heavy vehicles with very powerful engines, thundered up from the rear. The leaders passed without difficulty, as there was plenty of room. But their broad flat tires sucked up clouds of dust, and the moon had sunk behind a wooded height. One of the hindermost transports, taking too wide a bend, crashed into the wagon. The startled horses plunged, pulled Maertz off his perch, and dragged the wagon into a deep ditch. It fell on its side, and Dalroy and his companion were thrown into a field amid a swirl of laden sacks, some of which burst.