“He has no beard.  Look—­” Stooping, Volpatte passes the end of his stick under the chin of the corpse and breaks off a sort of slab of mud in which the head was set, a slab that looked like a beard.  Then he picks up the dead man’s helmet and puts it on his head, and for a moment holds before the eyes the round handles of his famous scissors so as to imitate spectacles.

“Ah!” we all cried together, “it’s Cocon!”

When you hear of or see the death of one of those who fought by your side and lived exactly the same life, you receive a direct blow in the flesh before even understanding.  It is truly as if one heard of his own destruction.  It is only later that one begins to mourn.

We look at the hideous head that is murder’s jest, the murdered head already and cruelly effacing our memories of Cocon.  Another comrade less.  We remain there around him, afraid.

“He was—­”

We should like to speak a little, but do not know what to say that would be sufficiently serious or telling or true.

“Come,” says Joseph, with an effort, wholly engrossed by his severe suffering, “I haven’t strength enough to be stopping all the time.”

We leave poor Cocon, the ex-statistician, with a last look, a look too short and almost vacant.

“One cannot imagine—­” says Volpatte.

No, one cannot imagine.  All these disappearances at once surpass the imagination.  There are not enough survivors now.  But we have vague idea of the grandeur of these dead.  They have given all; by degrees they have given all their strength, and finally they have given themselves, en bloc.  They have outpaced life, and their effort has something of superhuman perfection.

* * * * * *

“Tiens, he’s just been wounded, that one, and yet—­” A fresh wound is moistening the neck of a body that is almost a skeleton.

“It’s a rat,” says Volpatte.  “The stiffs are old ones, but the rats talk to ’em.  You see some rats laid out—­poisoned, p’raps—­near every body or under it.  Tiens, this poor old chap shall show us his.”  He lifts up the foot of the collapsed remains and reveals two dead rats.

“I should like to find Farfadet again,” says Volpatte.  “I told him to wait just when we started running and he clipped hold of me.  Poor lad, let’s hope he waited!”

So he goes to and fro, attracted towards the dead by a strange curiosity; and these, indifferent, bandy him about from one to another, and at each step he looks on the ground.  Suddenly he utters a cry of distress.  With his hand he beckons us as he kneels to a dead man.

Bertrand!

Acute emotion grips us.  He has been killed; he, too, like the rest, he who most towered over us by his energy and intelligence.  By virtue of always doing his duty. he has at last got killed.  He has at last found death where indeed it was.

We look at him, and then turn away from the sight and look upon each other.