'So long as those hellish body-snatchers do not get hold of the poor fool!' he sighed dolefully.
Just then his ear, trained of old to catch the slightest sound which might bring a ray of hope at moments such as this, perceived above the groanings and the sighs the distant tinkle of a bell.
'Now, Gilles, my friend,' he murmured vaguely to himself, 'collect your scattered senses and find out exactly where you are.'
Dizziness seized him again, and he came down on one knee.
'Jehan, you dog!' he exclaimed instinctively, 'where the devil are you?'
To which summons Maître Jehan was evidently unable to give reply, and Messire Gilles, very sore and very much out of humour, once more contrived to struggle to his feet. The tinkling of that bell seemed more insistent now; his re-awakened consciousness worked a little more actively.
'We fought just below Gembloux,' he reflected. 'The tinkling which I hear is the monastery bell on the heights above. Now, if it will go on tinkling till I have struck the right direction and see a light in the monastery windows, I doubt not but that those worthy monks will let me lie in the kennel of one of their dogs until I can find my way to a more congenial spot.'
From which cynical reflection it can be gathered that Messire Gilles had not a vast amount of faith in the hospitality of those good Benedictines of Gembloux; which doubt on his part is scarce to be wondered at, seeing that he had been fighting on the side of the heretics.
'If only that ass Jehan were here!' he added, with a final despondent sigh.
It was no earthly use for a wounded, half-fainting man to go searching for another in the darkness on this field littered with dead and dying. Gilles, whom a vague instinct drove to the thought, had soon to give up all idea of it as hopeless. The same acute sense of hearing which had brought to his semi-consciousness the sound of the tinkling bell, also caused him to perceive through the murky blackness the presence of the human vultures taking their pickings off the dead.