"And they've done the job jolly well! I know something about it, for I'm a gardener."
On the edge of a shell crater two gendarmes lay stretched side by side among the scattered clods of earth. One of them, a big, red-haired man, had a great gaping wound in his chest, and his right arm, doubled up in a strange posture, looked as if it had two elbows. The body of the other, a grey-headed corporal, seemed untouched, but in one of his eye-sockets there was nothing but a clot of blood, and the eye itself was hanging on his temple at the end of a white tendon.
"Poor old chap!" said the gardener.
He leaned over the corpse with its ghastly, one-eyed face staring at the sky, and reverently covered it with the silver-badged cap which had fallen near the dead man's side.
Behind one of the blue-slated roofs, which was still intact, lively flames were now breaking out but were immediately stifled by the clouds of smoke. A magnificent cone-shaped fir-tree, of funereal aspect, mounted guard over the fire like a solitary sentry.
We approached the building. Near the wall of the yard were lying two gunners and a couple of horses. They had just been killed, and the blood on the ground was still red. I recognized one of the men as the orderly of one of our officers. The other had fallen face downwards, his arms crossed under him.
A shell had bored a great hole in the yard. Three ducks, despite the heat of the flames, were dabbling about in a little green pond near a square-shaped dunghill. Another, the head of which had been cut off by a shell splinter, was lying on its side at the edge of the water.
Against the background formed by the great dark curtain of smoke, which from where we were standing hid half the sky, the skeleton of a barn stood out like a fascinating framework of molten metal. Long flames darted out from the doorway and licked a plough and a harrow which had been abandoned there. Above the hay-shoot a pulley-wheel for hoisting fodder, mounted in a recess in the front of the building, was red-hot. The roar of the guns was no longer audible, being drowned by the crackling of the fire and the sharp hiss of the sparks as they fell in the pond. One of the ducks, stung by a glowing splinter, was shaking her feathers.
"We're none too soon," said the gardener. "The mutton will be half cooked already."