ere were eight of them, sitting on one another's knees, and as the
last man alighted the manufacturer recognized Captain Beaudoin, and gave
utterance to a cry of terror and surprise.

"Ah, my poor friend! Wait, I will call my mother and my wife."

They came running up, leaving the bandages to be rolled by servants. The
attendants had already raised the captain and brought him into the room,
and were about to lay him down upon a pile of straw when Delaherche
noticed, lying on a bed, a soldier whose ashy face and staring eyes
exhibited no sign of life.

"Look, is he not dead, that man?"

"That's so!" replied the attendant. "He may as well make room for
someone else!"

He and one of his mates took the body by the arms and legs and carried
it off to the morgue that had been extemporized behind the lilac bushes.
A dozen corpses were already there in a row, stiff and stark, some drawn
out to their full length as if in an attempt to rid themselves of the
agony that racked them, others curled and twisted in every attitude
of suffering. Some seemed to have left the world with a sneer on their
faces, their eyes retroverted till naught was visible but the whites,
the grinning lips parted over the glistening teeth, while in others,
with faces unspeakably sorrowful, big tears still stood on the cheeks.
One, a mere boy, short and slight, half whose face had been shot away by
a cannon-ball, had his two hands clasped convulsively above his heart,
and in them a woman's photograph, one of those pale, blurred pictures
that are made in the quarters of the poor, bedabbled with his blood.
And at the feet of the dead had been thrown in a promiscuous pile
the amputated arms and legs, the refuse of the knife and saw of the
operating table, just as the butcher sweeps into a corner of his shop
the offal, the worthless odds and ends of flesh and bone.

Gilberte shuddered as she looked on Captain Beaudoin. Good God! how pale
he was, stretched out on his mattress, his face so white beneath the
encrusting grime! And the thought that but a few short hours before he
had held her in his arms, radiant in all his manly strength and beauty,
sent a chill of terror to her heart. She kneeled beside him.

"What a terrible misfortune, my friend! But it won't amount to anything,
will it?" And she drew her handkerchief from her pocket and began
mechanically to wipe his face, for she could not bear to look at it thus
soiled with powder, sweat, and clay. It