Explore "At the Sign of the Sword" by William le Queux on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
At that same moment when Aimee had listened to the dread news over the telephone, Edmond Valentin, in the uniform of a _sous-officier_ of Chasseurs-a-pied, in his heavy dark-green overcoat and peaked shako, with his bulging haversack upon his back, was kneeling in a hastily dug trench firing steadily across the broad sunlit river, which lay deep in its valley.
On the opposite bank ran the railway from Liege, across the Dutch frontier to Maastricht, and from beyond the line there appeared all along, for miles, light puffs of smoke which betrayed the position of the enemy, who had crossed those picturesque green hills of the frontier, and who were endeavouring to force a passage across the Meuse.