“See!” he said.
It was a gruesome sight. There lay a skeleton face downwards, a woman by the lines—an old woman by the coarse fibre of the bone. Between the ribs rose a long spike-like dagger made from a butcher’s sharpening knife, its keen point buried in the spine.
“You will observe,” said the commissary to the officer and to me as he took out his note book, “that the woman must have fallen on her dagger. The rats are many here—see their eyes glistening among that heap of bones—and you will also notice”—I shuddered as he placed his hand on the skeleton—“that but little time was lost by them, for the bones are scarcely cold!”
There was no other sign of any one near, living or dead; and so deploying again into line the soldiers passed on. Presently we came to the hut made of the old wardrobe. We approached. In five of the six compartments was an old man sleeping—sleeping so soundly that even the glare of the lanterns did not wake them. Old and grim and grizzled they looked, with their gaunt, wrinkled, bronzed faces and their white moustaches.
The officer called out harshly and loudly a word of command, and in an instant each one of them was on his feet before us and standing at “attention!”
“What do you here?”
“We sleep,” was the answer.
“Where are the other chiffoniers?” asked the commissary.
“Gone to work.”
“And you?”