“So you shall fight! The Sixth is a first-rate regiment, and there’ll be fighting for every one to-day.”
“But shall we soon get to your regiment?”
“In a quarter of an hour, at the outside.”
“If this good woman vouches for me,” reasoned Fabrizio, “I shall not be taken for a spy on account of my universal ignorance, and I shall get a chance of fighting.” At that moment the firing grew heavier, the reports following closely one upon the other, “like the beads in a rosary,” said Fabrizio to himself.
“I begin to hear the volleys,” said the cantinière, whipping up her pony, which seemed quite excited by the noise. She turned to the right, along a cross-road leading through the meadow; the mud was a foot deep, and the little cart almost stuck in it. Fabrizio pushed at the wheels. Twice over his horse fell down. Soon the road grew dryer, and dwindled into a mere foot-path across the sward. Fabrizio had not ridden on five hundred paces when his horse stopped short—a corpse lying across the path had startled both beast and rider.
Fabrizio, whose face was naturally pale, turned visibly green; the cantinière, looking at the dead man, said, as though talking to herself, “Nobody of our division,” and then, raising her eyes to our hero’s face, burst out laughing.
“Ha, ha, my child!” she cried, “here’s a lollypop for you!”
Fabrizio sat on, horror-struck. What most impressed him was the mud on the feet of the corpse, which had been stripped of its shoes, and of everything else, indeed, except a wretched pair of blood-stained trousers.
“Come,” said the cantinière, “tumble off your horse; you must get used to it. Ha,” she went on, “he got it through the head!” The corpse was hideously disfigured. A bullet had entered near the nose and passed out at the opposite temple. One eye was open and staring.