Immediately she was in possession of this slender clue Silvine insisted on starting out again.  An inferior officer of the medical department chanced to pass with a cart just then, collecting the dead; she hailed him and notified him of the presence of the wounded men, then, throwing the donkey’s bridle across her arm, urged him along over the muddy road, eager to reach the designated spot, beyond the big potato field.  When they had gone some distance she stopped, yielding to her despair.

“My God, where is the place!  Where can it be?”

Prosper looked about him, taxing his recollection fruitlessly.

“I told you, it is close beside the place where we made our charge.  If only I could find my poor Zephyr—­”

And he cast a wistful look on the dead horses that lay around them.  It had been his secret hope, his dearest wish, during the entire time they had been wandering over the plateau, to see his mount once more, to bid him a last farewell.

“It ought to be somewhere in this vicinity,” he suddenly said.  “See! over there to the left, there are the three trees.  You see the wheel-tracks?  And, look, over yonder is a broken-down caisson.  We have found the spot; we are here at last!”

Quivering with emotion, Silvine darted forward and eagerly scanned the faces of two corpses, two artillerymen who had fallen by the roadside.

“He is not here!  He is not here!  You cannot have seen aright.  Yes, that is it; some delusion must have cheated your eyes.”  And little by little an air-drawn hope, a wild delight crept into her mind.  “If you were mistaken, if he should be alive!  And be sure he is alive, since he is not here!”

Suddenly she gave utterance to a low, smothered cry.  She had turned, and was standing on the very position that the battery had occupied.  The scene was most frightful, the ground torn and fissured as by an earthquake and covered with wreckage of every description, the dead lying as they had fallen in every imaginable attitude of horror, arms bent and twisted, legs doubled under them, heads thrown back, the lips parted over the white teeth as if their last breath had been expended in shouting defiance to the foe.  A corporal had died with his hands pressed convulsively to his eyes, unable longer to endure the dread spectacle.  Some gold coins that a lieutenant carried in a belt about his body had been spilled at the same time as his life-blood, and lay scattered among his entrails.  There were Adolphe, the driver, and the gunner, Louis, clasped in each other’s arms in a fierce embrace, their sightless orbs starting from their sockets, mated even in death.  And there, at last, was Honore, recumbent on his disabled gun as on a bed of honor, with the great rent in his side that had let out his young life, his face, unmutilated and beautiful in its stern anger, still turned defiantly toward the Prussian batteries.

“Oh! my friend,” sobbed Silvine, “my friend, my friend—­”