The Day of Wrath: A Story of 1914. Tracy Louis
more talk!” he ordered sharply. “Do as I bid you, Herr Lieutenant of Reserves!”
“Captain Dalroy!” cried the girl in a voice of utter dismay, “don’t let them part us!”
Von Halwig pointed to a door. “In there with him!” he growled, and Dalroy was hustled away. Irene screamed, and tried to avoid the Prussian’s outstretched hand. He grasped her determinedly.
“Don’t be a fool!” he hissed in English. “I can save you. He is done with. A firing-party or a rope will account for him at daybreak. Ah! calm yourself, gnädiges Fräulein. There are consolations, even in war.”
Dalroy contrived, out of the tail of his eye, to see that the distraught girl was led toward a ladies’ waiting-room, two doors from the apartment into which he was thrust. There he was searched by the lieutenant of reserves, not skilfully, because the man missed nearly the whole of his money, which he carried in a pocket in the lining of his waistcoat. All else was taken – tickets, papers, loose cash, even a cigarette-case and favourite pipe.
The instructions to the sentry were emphatic: “Don’t close the door! Admit no one without sending for me! Shoot or stab the prisoner if he moves!”
And the fat man bustled away. The station was swarming with military big-wigs. He must remain in evidence.
During five long minutes Dalroy reviewed the situation. Probably he would be executed as a spy. At best, he could not avoid internment in a fortress till the end of the war. He preferred to die in a struggle for life and liberty. Men had escaped in conditions quite as desperate. Why not he? The surge of impotent anger subsided in his veins, and he took thought.
Outside the open door stood the sentry, holding his rifle, with fixed bayonet, in the attitude of a sportsman who expects a covey of partridges to rise from the stubble. A window of plain glass gave on to the platform. Seemingly, it had not been opened since the station was built. Three windows of frosted glass in the opposite wall were, to all appearance, practicable. Judging by the sounds, the station square lay without. Was there a lock and key on the door? Or a bolt? He could not tell from his present position. The sentry had orders to kill him if he moved. Perhaps the man would not interpret the command literally. At any rate, that was a risk he must take. With head sunk, and hands behind his back, obviously in a state of deep dejection, he began to stroll to and fro. Well, he had a fighting chance. He was not shot forthwith.
A slight commotion on the platform caught his eye, the sentry’s as well. A tall young officer, wearing a silver helmet, and accompanied by a glittering staff, clanked past; with him the lieutenant of reserves, gesticulating. Dalroy recognised one of the Emperor’s sons; but the sentry had probably never seen the princeling before, and was agape. And there was not only a key but a bolt!
With three noiseless strides, Dalroy was at the door and had slammed it. The key turned easily, and the bolt shot home. Then he raced to the middle window, unfastened the hasp, and raised the lower sash. He counted on the thick-headed sentry wasting some precious seconds in trying to force the door, and he was right. As it happened, before the man thought of looking in through the platform window Dalroy had not only lowered the other window behind him but dropped from the sill to the pavement between the wall and a covered van which stood there.
Now he was free – free as any Briton could be deemed free in Aix-la-Chapelle at that hour, one man among three army corps, an unarmed Englishman among a bitterly hostile population which recked naught of France or Belgium or Russia, but hated England already with an almost maniacal malevolence.
And Irene Beresford, that sweet-voiced, sweet-faced English girl, was a prisoner at the mercy of a “big blonde brute,” a half-drunken, wholly enraged Prussian Junker. The thought rankled and stung. It was not to be borne. For the first time that night Dalroy knew what fear was, and in a girl’s behalf, not in his own.
Could he save her? Heaven had befriended him thus far; would a kindly Providence clear his brain and nerve his spirit to achieve an almost impossible rescue?
The prayer was formless and unspoken, yet it was answered. He had barely gathered his wits after that long drop of nearly twelve feet into the station yard before he was given a vague glimpse of a means of delivering the girl from her immediate peril.
CHAPTER II
IN THE VORTEX
The van, one among a score of similar vehicles, was backed against the curb of a raised path. At the instant Dalroy quitted the window-ledge a railway employé appeared from behind another van on the left, and was clearly bewildered by seeing a well-dressed man springing from such an unusual and precarious perch.
The new-comer, a big, burly fellow, who wore a peaked and lettered cap, a blouse, baggy breeches, and sabots, and carried a lighted hand-lamp, looked what, in fact, he was – an engine-cleaner. In all likelihood he guessed that any one choosing such a curious exit from a waiting-room was avoiding official scrutiny. He hurried forward at once, holding the lamp above his head, because it was dark behind the row of vans.
“Hi, there!” he cried. “A word with you, Freiherr!” The title, of course, was a bit of German humour. Obviously, he was bent on investigating matters. Dalroy did not run. In the street without he heard the tramp of marching troops, the jolting of wagons, the clatter of horses. He knew that a hue and cry could have only one result – he would be pulled down by a score of hands. Moreover, with the sight of that suspicious Teuton face, its customary boorish leer now replaced by a surly inquisitiveness, came the first glimmer of a fantastically daring way of rescuing Irene Beresford.
He advanced, smiling pleasantly. “It’s all right, Heinrich,” he said. “I’ve arrived by train from Berlin, and the station was crowded. Being an acrobat, I took a bounce. What?”
The engine-cleaner was not a quick-witted person. He scowled, but allowed Dalroy to come near – too near.
“I believe you’re a verdammt Engl – ” he began.
But the popular German description of a Briton died on his lips, because Dalroy put a good deal of science and no small leaven of brute force into a straight punch which reached that cluster of nerves known to pugilism as “the point.” The German fell as though he had been pole-axed, and his thick skull rattled on the pavement.
Dalroy grabbed the lamp before the oil could gush out, placed it upright on the ground, and divested the man of blouse, baggy breeches, and sabots. Luckily, since every second was precious, he found that he was able to wedge his boots into the sabots, which he could not have kept on his feet otherwise. His training as a soldier had taught him the exceeding value of our Fifth Henry’s advice to the British army gathered before Harfleur:
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears
Then imitate the action of the tiger.
The warring tiger does not move slowly. Half-a-minute after his would-be captor had crashed headlong to the hard cobbles of Aix-la-Chapelle, Dalroy was creeping between two wagons, completing a hasty toilet by tearing off collar and tie, and smearing his face and hands with oil and grease from lamp and cap. Even as he went he heard a window of the waiting-room being flung open, and the excited cries which announced the discovery of a half-naked body lying beneath in the gloom.
He saw now that to every van was harnessed a pair of horses, their heads deep in nose-bags, while men in the uniform of the Commissariat Corps were grouped around an officer who was reading orders. The vans were sheeted in black tarpaulins. With German attention to detail, their destination, contents, and particular allotment were stencilled on the covers in white paint: “Liège, baggage and fodder, cavalry division, 7th Army Corps.” He learnt subsequently that this definite legend appeared on front and rear and on both sides.
Thinking quickly, he decided that the burly person whose outer garments he was now wearing had probably been taking a short cut to the station entrance when he received the surprise of his life. Somewhat higher up on the right, therefore, Dalroy went back to the narrow pavement close to the