"From your description it seems to be a suitable post for a strong picket watching the river."
"No, monsieur. The slope falls away from the river, while the opposite bank is flat and open. I have been a soldier in my time, and I understand these things. It would be all right for observation purposes if these pigs hadn't seized the bridge-heads at Visé and Argenteau; but I saw their cursed Uhlans on the left bank many hours ago."
"Lead on, friend," said Dalroy simply. "When we come within a hundred mètres of the main road let me do the scouting. I'll tell you when and how to advance."
"Ah, a thousand pardons if I presumed to lecture you. Yet I am certainly in the right about the wood."
"I have never doubted you, Monsieur Joos. Do you know what time the moon rises?"
"All the better, if you are sure of the way."
"I could find it blindfolded. So could Léontine. 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.