Lying there among the undergrowth, listening to the tramp of an army corps, and watching the flicker of countless rifle-barrels in the moonlight, he forgot his own plight, and thought only of the unpreparedness of Britain. He was a soldier by training and inclination. He harboured no delusions. Man for man, the alert, intelligent, and chivalrous British army was far superior to the cannon-fodder of the German machine. But of what avail was the hundred thousand Britain could put in the field in the west of Europe against the four millions of Germany? Here was no combat of a David and a Goliath, but of one man against forty. Naturally, France and Russia came into the picture, yet he feared that France would break at the outset of the campaign, while Austria might hold Russia in check long enough to enable Germany to work her murderous design. Be it remembered, he could not possibly estimate the fine and fierce valour of the resistance offered by Belgium. It seemed to him that the Teuton hordes must already be hacking their way to the coast, leaving sufficient men and guns to contain the Belgian fortresses, and halting only when the white cliffs of England were visible across the Channel.
If his anxious thoughts wandered, however, and a gnawing doubt ate into his soul lest the British fleet might, as the Germans in Visé claimed, have been taken at a disadvantage, he did not allow his eyes and ears to neglect the duties of the hour.
A fall in the temperature had condensed the river mist, and the air near the ground was much clearer now than at eight o'clock. The breeze, too, gathered the dust into wraiths and scurrying wisps through which glimpses of the sloping uplands toward Aix were obtainable. During one of these unhampered moments he caught sight of something so weird and uncanny that he was positively startled.
A sorrow-laden, waxen-hued face seemed to peer at him for an instant, and then vanish. But there could be no face so high in the air, twenty feet or more above the heads of a Prussian regiment bawling "_Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles_." The land was level XXXX thereabouts. The apparition, consequently, must be a mere trick of the imagination. Yet he saw, or fancied he saw, that same spectral face twice again at intervals of a few seconds, and was vexed with himself for allowing his bemused senses to yield to some supernatural influence. Then the vision came a fourth time, and a thrill ran through every fibre in his body.