"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search for him—and where? ... Tell me ... the regiment and the color of the uniform?"
Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing of one of the rigid figures near them. He noted the red and green plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian Dragoon. He muttered, even while mentally registering other details of the Chasseur's uniform—noting the crest embroidered on the green schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead rider's thigh:
"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other that they fought like devils yesterday.... Half a dozen regiments might have been cut up here! And we have to find one man somewhere in a square mile of piled-up bodies.... If one only had a bloodhound and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."
Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging dewlap. The issue of the search was to prove this. For an hour, as it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of dead men. Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning, the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation of musketry. Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.
About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the previous day had raged—the billows of the sea of Death had beaten fiercely. The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped sharply—from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and equine. But the slender figure in black moved between them—stooped to pass under them, seldom faltering. When the young man who followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without answering, and kept on. The silent gesture meant:
"Not yet! A little farther still!... Be patient with me, I beg of you!"
For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by myriads of stiffened arms.
She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely peaked and shrunken:
"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is failing.... See, see! O Mother of God!... O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"
The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's blood to snow-water. He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from some sight of intolerable horror: