"The gods have been compassionate. I feared that we had lost. Evil is the plight of a leader; without drawing a sword and even without seeing, he must answer for everything!"
"Live thou, O conquering commander, live through eternity!" cried the warriors.
"A fine victory for me!" laughed Ramses. "I do not know even how they won it."
"He wins a victory, and wonders how it came!" cried some one in the retinue.
"I say that I saw not the face of the battle," explained the prince.
"Be at rest, our commander," said Pentuer. "Thou didst dispose the army so wisely that the enemy had to be beaten. And in what way? Just as if that did not belong to thee, but the regiments."
"I did not even draw a sword. I do not see one Libyan," complained the prince.
On the southern heights there was a struggling and a seething, but in the valley the dust had begun to settle here and there, and a crowd of Egyptian soldiers were visible as through a mist, their spears pointed upward.
Ramses turned his horse in that direction and rode out to the deserted field of battle, where just recently had been the struggle of the central column. It was a place some hundreds of yards in width, with deep furrows filled with bodies of the dead and wounded. On the side along which the prince was approaching, Egyptians and Libyans lay intermixed, in a long line, still farther on there were almost none except Libyans.
In places bodies lay close to bodies; sometimes on one spot three or four were piled one on another. The sand was stained with brownish blood patches; the wounds were ghastly. Both hands were cut from one man, another had his head split to the body, from a third man, the entrails were dropping. Some were howling in convulsions, and from their mouths, filled with sand, came forth curses, or prayers imploring some one to slay them.