about the wood."

"I have never doubted you, Monsieur Joos. Do you know what time the moon
rises?"

"Late. Eleven o'clock at the earliest."

"All the better, if you are sure of the way."

"I could find it blindfolded. So could Leontine. She goes there to pick
bilberries."

The homely phrase was unconsciously dramatic. From the highroad came the
raucous singing of German soldiers, the falsetto of drunkards with an
ear for music. In the distance heavy artillery was growling, and high
explosive shells were bursting with a violence that seemed to rend the
sky. Over an area of many miles to the west the sharp tapping of
musketry and the staccato splutter of machine guns told of hundreds of
thousands of men engaged in a fierce struggle for supremacy. On every
hand the horizon was red with the glare of burning houses. The thought
of a village girl picking bilberries in a land so scarred by war and
rapine produced an effect at once striking and fantastic. It was as
though a ray of pure white light had pierced the lurid depths of a
volcano.

Dalroy advised the women to take off their linen aprons, and Madame Joos
to remove as well a coif of the same material. He unfastened and threw
away the stump of the bayonet. Then they moved on in Indian file, the
miller leading.

A definite quality of blackness loomed above the low-lying shroud of
mist which at night in still weather always marks the course of a great
river.

"The wood!" whispered Joos. "We are near the road now."

Dalroy went forward to spy out the conditions. A column of infantry was
passing. These fellows were silent, and therefore sinister. They marched
like tired men, and their shuffling feet raised a cloud of dust.

An officer lighted a cigarette. "Those guzzling Prussians would empty
the Meuse if it ran with wine," he growled, evidently in response to a
remark from a companion.

"Our brigadier was very angry about the broken bottles in the streets of
Argenteau," said the other. "Two tires were ruined before the chauffeur
realised that the place was littered with glass."

These were Saxons, cleaner-minded, manlier fellows than the Prussians.
Behind them Dalroy heard the rumble of commissariat wagons. He failed
utterly to understand the why and wherefore of the direction the troops
were taking. According to his reckoning, they should have been going the
opposite way. But that was no concern of his at the moment. He knew the
Saxon by repute, and hurried