But Prosper made no answer; he also was becoming uneasy.  What distressed him even more than the sights of suffering among his fellow-soldiers was the dead horses, the poor brutes that lay outstretched upon their side, that were met with in great numbers.  Many of them presented a most pitiful spectacle, in all sorts of harrowing attitudes, with heads torn from the body, with lacerated flanks from which the entrails protruded.  Many were resting on their back, with their four feet elevated in the air like signals of distress.  The entire extent of the broad plain was dotted with them.  There were some that death had not released after their two days’ agony; at the faintest sound they would raise their head, turning it eagerly from right to left, then let it fall again upon the ground, while others lay motionless and momentarily gave utterance to that shrill scream which one who has heard it can never forget, the lament of the dying horse, so piercingly mournful that earth and heaven seemed to shudder in unison with it.  And Prosper, with a bleeding heart, thought of poor Zephyr, and told himself that perhaps he might see him once again.

Suddenly he became aware that the ground was trembling under the thundering hoof-beats of a headlong charge.  He turned to look, and had barely time to shout to his companion: 

“The horses, the horses!  Get behind that wall!”

From the summit of a neighboring eminence a hundred riderless horses, some of them still bearing the saddle and master’s kit, were plunging down upon them at break-neck speed.  They were cavalry mounts that had lost their masters and remained on the battlefield, and instinct had counseled them to associate together in a band.  They had had neither hay nor oats for two days, and had cropped the scanty grass from off the plain, shorn the hedge-rows of leaves and twigs, gnawed the bark from the trees, and when they felt the pangs of hunger pricking at their vitals like a keen spur, they started all together at a mad gallop and charged across the deserted, silent fields, crushing the dead out of all human shape, extinguishing the last spark of life in the wounded.

The band came on like a whirlwind; Silvine had only time to pull the donkey and cart to one side where they would be protected by the wall.

“Mon Dieu! we shall be killed!”

But the horses had taken the obstacle in their stride and were already scouring away in the distance on the other side with a rumble like that of a receding thunder-storm; striking into a sunken road they pursued it as far as the corner of a little wood, behind which they were lost to sight.

Silvine, when she had brought the cart back into the road, insisted that Prosper should answer her question before they proceeded further.

“Come, where is it?  You told me you could find the spot with your eyes bandaged; where is it?  We have reached the ground.”

He, drawing himself up and anxiously scanning the horizon in every direction, seemed to become more and more perplexed.