Explore "At the Sign of the Sword" by William le Queux on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The German tidal-wave was steadily advancing. Prussia had set her heel upon Belgium.
A perfect horde of jack-booted Uhlans had swarmed over the country, and had already made themselves hated by their mad, murderous acts of cruelty and pillage. They were -- as the blasphemous Kaiser had intended they should be when making his plans at Potsdam -- agents of the Terror. Of the nineteen regiments of them in the German army, no fewer than fourteen were being employed to terrorise the inoffensive villagers of poor little Belgium; yet so bravely did the Belgian army fight that within twelve days the larger part of this force, in their gaily-braided uniforms and carrying their ready lances -- upon which they sometimes impaled children -- were either killed, wounded, or held prisoners. These brutes, who had boasted of their "kultur," and commanded by noblemen, had been sent out to live upon the country; but they had been entrapped everywhere, and revenged themselves by acts of the most fiendish and horrible cruelty unequalled in modern history.