As they approached the farmhouse Silvine noticed other peasants engaged with spades and picks in digging long trenches; but these men were under the direct command of Prussian officers, who, with nothing more formidable than a light walking-stick in their hands, stood by, stiff and silent, and superintended the work.  They had requisitioned the inhabitants of all the villages of the vicinity in this manner, fearing that decomposition might be hastened, owing to the rainy weather.  Two cart-loads of dead bodies were standing near, and a gang of men was unloading them, laying the corpses side by side in close contiguity to one another, not searching them, not even looking at their faces, while two men followed after, equipped with great shovels, and covered the row with a layer of earth, so thin that the ground had already begun to crack beneath the showers.  The work was so badly and hastily done that before two weeks should have elapsed each of those fissures would be breathing forth pestilence.  Silvine could not resist the impulse to pause at the brink of the trench and look at those pitiful corpses as they were brought forward, one after another.  She was possessed by a horrible fear that in each fresh body the men brought from the cart she might recognize Honore.  Was not that he, that poor wretch whose left eye had been destroyed?  No!  Perhaps that one with the fractured jaw was he?  The one thing certain to her mind was that if she did not make haste to find him, wherever he might be on that boundless, indeterminate plateau, they would pick him up and bury him in a common grave with the others.  She therefore hurried to rejoin Prosper, who had gone on to the farmhouse with the cart.

“Mon Dieu! how is it that you are not better informed?  Where is the place?  Ask the people, question them.”

There were none but Prussians at the farm, however, together with a woman servant and her child, just come in from the woods, where they had been near perishing of thirst and hunger.  The scene was one of patriarchal simplicity and well-earned repose after the fatigues of the last few days.  Some of the soldiers had hung their uniforms from a clothes-line and were giving them a thorough brushing, another was putting a patch on his trousers, with great neatness and dexterity, while the cook of the detachment had built a great fire in the middle of the courtyard on which the soup was boiling in a huge pot from which ascended a most appetizing odor of cabbage and bacon.  There is no denying that the Prussians generally displayed great moderation toward the inhabitants of the country after the conquest, which was made the easier to them by the spirit of discipline that prevailed among the troops.  These men might have been taken for peaceable citizens just come in from their daily avocations, smoking their long pipes.  On a bench beside the door sat a stout, red-bearded man, who had taken up the servant’s child, a little urchin five or six years old, and was dandling it and talking baby-talk to it in German, delighted to see the little one laugh at the harsh syllables which it could not understand.