Prussian, with such tigerish fierceness that both men rolled over and over on the gravel to the shattered kitchen door, clasped in a mortal embrace.  The trees of the park looked down on many such scenes of slaughter, and the green lawn was piled with corpses.  But it was before the stoop, around the sky-blue sofa and fauteuils, that the conflict raged with greatest fury; a maddened mob of savages, firing at one another at point-blank range, so that hair and beards were set on fire, tearing one another with teeth and nails when a knife was wanting to slash the adversary’s throat.

Then Gaude, with his sorrowful face, the face of a man who has had his troubles of which he does not care to speak, was seized with a sort of sudden heroic madness.  At that moment of irretrievable defeat, when he must have known that the company was annihilated and that there was not a man left to answer his summons, he grasped his bugle, carried it to his lips and sounded the general, in so tempestuous, ear-splitting strains that one would have said he wished to wake the dead.  Nearer and nearer came the Prussians, but he never stirred, only sounding the call the louder, with all the strength of his lungs.  He fell, pierced with many bullets, and his spirit passed in one long-drawn, parting wail that died away and was lost upon the shuddering air.

Rochas made no attempt to fly; he seemed unable to comprehend.  Even more erect than usual, he waited the end, stammering: 

“Well, what’s the matter? what’s the matter?”

Such a possibility had never entered his head as that they could be defeated.  They were changing everything in these degenerate days, even to the manner of fighting; had not those fellows a right to remain on their own side of the valley and wait for the French to go and attack them?  There was no use killing them; as fast as they were killed more kept popping up.  What kind of a d-----d war was it, anyway, where they were able to collect ten men against their opponent’s one, where they never showed their face until evening, after blazing away at you all day with their artillery until you didn’t know on which end you were standing?  Aghast and confounded, having failed so far to acquire the first idea of the rationale of the campaign, he was dimly conscious of the existence of some mysterious, superior method which he could not comprehend, against which he ceased to struggle, although in his dogged stubbornness he kept repeating mechanically: 

“Courage, my children! victory is before us!”

Meanwhile he had stooped and clutched the flag.  That was his last, his only thought, to save the flag, retreating again, if necessary, so that it might not be defiled by contact with Prussian hands.  But the staff, although it was broken, became entangled in his legs; he narrowly escaped falling.  The bullets whistled past him, he felt that death was near; he stripped the silk from the staff and tore it into shreds, striving to destroy it utterly.