The man eyed them carefully. "Where are you from?" he demanded in true Flemish.
"What has that to do with it?" grinned Maertz, in the same _patois_.
The questioner was satisfied. He jerked a thumb toward the French frontier. "Dead uns!" he said. "They're killing Germans like flies down yonder. They can't bury them--haven't time--so they tie the corpses together, slinging four on a pole for easy handling, ship them to Germany, and chuck them into furnaces."
"So," guffawed Maertz, "the swine know where they are going then!"
To Dalroy's secret amazement, Irene, who understood each word, laughed with the others. Campaigning had not coarsened, but it had undeniably hardened her nature. A month ago she would have shuddered at sight of these dun trucks, with their ghastly freight. Now, so long as they only contained Germans, she surveyed them with interest.
"Allowing forty bodies to one wagon," she said, "there are over a thousand dead men in that train alone."
The farmer spat approval. "I've been busy, and have missed some; but that's the tenth lot which has gone east this morning," he remarked cheerfully.
"Is the road to Nivelles fairly open?" Dalroy ventured to inquire.
"One never knows. Anyhow, always give the next village as your destination. If doubtful, travel by night."
This counsel was well meant. In the silent bitterness of hours yet to come, Dalroy recalled it, and wished he had profited by it.
Roughly speaking, they had set out on a fifty miles' tramp, which the men could have tackled in two days, or less. But the presence of Irene lowered the scale, and Dalroy apportioned matters so that twelve miles daily formed their programme, with, as the _entrepreneurs_ say, power to increase or curtail. Thus, that first afternoon, the date being September 2nd, they pulled up at Gembloux, quite a small place, finding supper and beds in a farm beyond the village.
Next day they pushed ahead through Nivelles, and entered the forest of Soignies, that undulating woodland on which Wellington depended for the protection of a dangerous flank during the unavoidable retreat to the coast if Napoleon had beaten the British army at Waterloo.
Dalroy explained the Iron Duke's strategy to Irene as they paced a road which provides an ideal walking tour.