All at once he felt the ground shaking as under the gallop of a furious charge. He looked round, and barely had time to call to his companion: 'The horses! the horses! Run behind that wall!'
A hundred chargers or so, all riderless, and some still laden with heavy kits, were rushing from the summit of a neighbouring slope, rolling towards them at a hellish pace. These were the mounts which had lost their riders in the fight Remaining on the field, they had instinctively collected together, and having neither hay nor straw, they had for a couple of days past been cropping the scanty grass, pulling the hedges to pieces, and gnawing the bark of the trees. And now, whenever hunger pricked them like a spur, they started off all together at a mad gallop, and charged across the blank, silent country, crushing the dead, and finishing off the wounded.
The herd was drawing near, and Silvine only had time to pull the donkey and the little cart behind the low wall: 'Good heavens! they will break everything!'
The horses, however, had leapt the barrier; there was merely a roll of thunder as it were, and then they were galloping off, plunging into a hollow road which stretched away to the verge of a wood, behind which they disappeared.
Having led the donkey back into the track, Silvine insisted upon Prosper answering her: 'Come, where is it?'
Turning and surveying the horizon on every side, he answered: 'There were three trees—I must find them—a fellow doesn't see very clearly, you know, when he's fighting, and it isn't easy afterwards to find out the road one took.'
Then, on perceiving some people on his left, two men and a woman, it occurred to him to question them. But the woman fled at his approach, and the men warned him away with threatening gestures. Others whom he saw, clad in sordid garments, inexpressibly filthy, and with the suspicious-looking faces of bandits, were careful to avoid him, slinking away between the bushes like crawling, crafty animals. And on noticing that the dead, in the rear of these evil-looking men, were shoeless, displaying their bare white feet in the grey light, he ended by realising that these prowlers were some of the tramps following the hostile armies, plunderers of corpses, predatory German Jews, who had entered France in the wake of the invasion. One tall, thin fellow darted away ahead of him at a gallop, with a sack burdening his shoulders, and stolen silver and stolen watches jingling in his pockets.
A lad of thirteen or fourteen allowed Prosper to approach him, however, and protested loudly when the Chasseur, finding that he was French, began overwhelming him with reproaches: What! couldn't a chap earn his living, then? For his part, he was simply picking up chassepots, and received five sous for each one that he found. That same morning, having fled from his village with his stomach empty since the previous day, he had hired himself out to a man from Luxemburg who had contracted with the Prussians to collect the rifles scattered over the battlefield. The Germans, indeed, feared that if the weapons were picked up by the frontier peasants, they would be carried off into Belgium, and sent back into France by another route, and thus quite a crowd of poor devils was now hunting for the guns, seeking for so many five-sous, rummaging among the herbage, like the peasant-women who may be seen bending double in the meadows whilst searching the grass for dandelions.
'A dirty trade!' Prosper growled.
'Well, a chap must eat,' the youngster answered. 'I'm not robbing anyone.'