They turned to the left in view of reaching the plateau of Illy by the road passing through the wood of La Garenne. But here again they were delayed, and a score of times did they despair of getting through the wood, so many were the obstacles they met with. At every step the trees, cut down by the shells, barred the road like fallen giants. This, indeed, was the bombarded forest, through which as through some square of the Old Guard of steadfast, veteran firmness, the cannonade had swept, destroying venerable lives. On all sides were prostrate trunks, stripped, pitted, rent like human breasts. This scene of destruction, with its multitude of massacred branches shedding tears of sap, was fraught with the same heartrending horror as a field of human battle. And there were also corpses; the corpses of soldiers who had fallen beside the trees as by the side of comrades. A lieutenant was lying there, with his mouth quite bloody and with both hands still clawing the soil and tearing up tufts of grass. Farther on a captain had passed away, stretched upon his stomach, and with his head upraised to bellow forth his pain. Others seemed to be sleeping among the bushes, whilst a Zouave, whose blue sash had caught fire, had had his beard and hair entirely burnt. And all along the narrow woodland road, it repeatedly became necessary to push the corpses on one side so that the donkey might continue on its way.
All at once, however, on reaching a little valley, the horror came to an end. The battle had, doubtless, taken another direction, leaving this delightful nook unscathed. Not a twig of the trees had been broken, not a drop of blood had stained the moss. A beck flowed past through duckweed, and lofty beech trees shaded the path which skirted it. With the freshness of the running water, the quivering silence of the greenery, the spot was fraught with a penetrating charm, an adorable peacefulness.
Prosper stopped the donkey in order that it might drink from the stream. 'Ah! how pleasant it is here!' he said, thus spontaneously giving expression to his relief.
Silvine glanced around her with astonished eyes, anxious at finding that she also felt refreshed and almost happy. Why should this secluded nook wear such an aspect of peaceful felicity when all was mourning and suffering around it? She made a despairing, eager gesture. 'Quick! quick! let us get on. Where is it? Where did you see Honoré?'
Fifty yards farther on, as they at last arrived at the plateau of Illy, the level plain suddenly spread itself out before them. This time they had come to the real battlefield, the bare expanse of country stretching away to the horizon under the great wan sky, whence frequent showers were streaming. No heaps of dead were to be seen. All the Germans must have been already buried, for not one of them remained among the scattered corpses of the French strewn along the roads, over the stubbles, and in the hollows, according to the phases of the struggle. The first corpse they came upon was that of a sergeant, a superb, sturdy young fellow whose face was peaceful, with parted lips which seemed to be smiling. A hundred paces farther on, however, they saw another corpse lying across the road and this was frightfully mutilated, with the head half carried away and the shoulders splashed with brain-matter. Then, after passing the solitary corpses, they came upon little clusters of dead here and there. They saw seven kneeling in a line, with their guns raised to their shoulders, who had been shot dead whilst in the act of firing; whilst near them had fallen a non-commissioned officer in the posture of one giving the word of command. The road then followed a narrow ravine, and horror again took possession of them, for an entire company seemed to have fallen here, annihilated by shrapnel. The trench-like hollow was filled with bodies, men who had slipped, toppled over, and become entangled together, some with severed limbs, and others with twisted hands, which had clawed the yellow bank in their futile efforts to save themselves from falling. A black band of crows flew away as Silvine and Prosper approached; and swarms of flies were already buzzing over the bodies, flocking to the spot in thousands, all eager to drink the fresh blood flowing from the wounds.
'Where is it, where is it?' repeated Silvine.
They were now skirting a ploughed field covered with knapsacks, of which some regiment, hard pressed by the enemy, must have rid itself in a fit of panic. The débris strewing the soil indicated various episodes of the struggle. Scattered képis looking like large poppies with shreds of uniforms, epaulettes and belts, all covering a field of beets, denoted a fierce hand-to-hand encounter, one of the few close tussles engaged in during that formidable artillery duel which had lasted for twelve long hours. But it was more particularly against broken or abandoned weapons that one stumbled at almost every step—sabres, bayonets, chassepots, in such great numbers that they seemed as it were the fruit of the earth, a crop that had sprouted from the soil on some day of abomination. Pans and cans also littered the roadways, together with all sorts of things that had fallen from the rent knapsacks—rice, brushes, and cartridges. And field followed field amid the same immense devastation, fences torn down, trees scorched as though they had been set on fire, the very soil furrowed by the shells, or so trodden underfoot, so hardened, so ravaged by the gallop of masses of men, that it seemed as though it must for evermore remain unproductive. And while the rain blurred everything with its wan moisture, a persistent smell arose, the smell peculiar to battlefields, which stink of fermenting straw and burning cloth, a commingling of filth and gunpowder.
Weary of these fields of death, through leagues and leagues of which it seemed to her she had been marching, Silvine gazed around her with growing anguish; 'Where is it? where is it, then?'
But no answer came from Prosper, who was growing uneasy. For his own part, he was upset less by the sight of his dead comrades than by that of the horses, the poor horses prone on their sides, such numbers of which they encountered. Some were really pitiable to see, lying in frightful postures with heads torn off and flanks ripped open, giving egress to their entrails. Several, stretched upon their backs and displaying their huge bellies, upreared their four stiffened legs like posts. The boundless plain was quite bumpy with these stricken steeds. Some of them were not yet dead though they had been in agony for two days past; and at the faintest sound, they raised their pain-racked heads, wagging them to right and left, and then letting them fall again; whilst others, remaining motionless, gave vent at times to a loud call, that plaint of the dying horse, so peculiar, so frightfully dolorous, that the very atmosphere quivered at the sound. And Prosper, with his heart lacerated, bethought himself of Zephyr, fancying that he would perhaps see him again.