Parties of stretcher-bearers followed the soldiers, and, starting at once, began to bend over the fallen forms lying about the hall, turning men over, dragging the dead aside, and lifting those who were wounded out of the mass. Coming to a distant corner, not so far indeed from the exit leading to the stairway which Jules and Henri had defended, a party of bearers discovered a pack of Germans lying in all directions, their limbs stretched in the most fantastic postures, some on their sides, their heads resting on an arm as if they were sleeping; others on their faces, their arms doubled up beneath them; and others, again, on their backs, stiff and stark already.
"Dead!" said the commander of the party, a junior non-commissioned officer. "On one side with him!"
"Dead!" repeated one of the bearers, leaning over another figure. "Here, he's not a big man, I can manage him single-handed."
"As dead as any," cried a third, and seemed quite jovial about it. "Here we are! He's no weight at all—quite a puny fellow for a Brandenburger."
They dragged perhaps half a dozen bodies away from the corner to the far wall, and laid them in a row beside others already collected; then, gathering up the wounded and carrying them outside, they returned again, completing their task after some few minutes.
"Light up!" Max, that short and snappy German officer, commanded. "Get a fire going, and let us resume the meal. One moment though! Have any of you seen a sign of those Frenchmen—the two whom we were about to shoot?"
"One there, sir," came the answer, while a bearer holding a torch lit up that part of the hall by the wall against which Jules and his fellow-prisoner had been stationed. "He's dead—a piece of masonry, dislodged by the explosion, fell on him."
Max seized the torch from the man, and, striding forward, bent over the figure of the poilu, and, turning the body with his foot—for this German was an individual possessed of little feeling, indeed a heartless wretch, a callous fellow—he placed the torch nearer, and stared at the face of the Frenchman.
"Burr! Not my man! And no one has seen the other?"
"No one!"