hands, Henri at once
admitted that he and Jules were Frenchmen, and Stuart English.

"Monsieur," he said, "we throw ourselves upon your kindness. You are a
Belgian patriot, you say, while we are refugees from Ruhleben. Assist
us, help us to get away, for we are in the midst of enemies."

There was a short pause after that, while each one of the four peered
hard into the darkness, the little man staring at Stuart's huge figure,
and at the smaller proportions of Jules and Henri; while those three
young fellows regarded the Belgian intently, indeed almost fearfully.

"Come this way, messieurs; follow me. Walk some ten paces behind me,
and have no fear, for have I not said that I am a Belgian patriot? You
wish to get to your own countries, eh? To fight this brutal Kaiser and
his people? Bien! Follow, and I will lend you assistance."

CHAPTER VIII

The Verdun Salient

It was three nights after that on which Henri and his friends had
reached Louvain--that deserted city wrecked by German violence--and had
so fortunately and so literally hit up against a Belgian patriot, that
four figures crept from a tenement which had escaped the general
wreckage.

"You will walk along beside me, my friends, as though we were just
inmates of the city," said the Belgian, just before they left the house
in which he had given the three fugitives a resting-place. "If we pass
German soldiers, take your hats off to them, and if they challenge,
leave me to answer. Now let us be going, and I think that we may hope
for success."

Those four figures, Henri and his friends, now dressed in rough
civilian clothing, crept off along the deserted streets, and, threading
their way through the outskirts of the ruined city, and passing on
occasion groups of German soldiers whom they obsequiously saluted, at
length reached the open country. Tramping on through the night, they
sheltered, just before the dawn broke, in a ruined house in another
city, and repeated a similar process on the following morning. It was
on the third night that the Belgian led them into what had once been a
peaceful country village, and which was now merely a mass of tumbled
masonry.

"We are close to the Dutch frontier, my friends," he told them, "but
the way there is not so easy as it might seem, for the Germans have
stretched a barbed-wire fence between Belgium and Holland, and on it is
suspended an electric wire, charged with a high voltage, which kills
in