een detained, it so chanced that they found, in company with the
officer who had treated them so harshly, a general on his way to visit
the battlefield. This gentleman requested to be allowed to see the pass,
which he examined attentively and restored to Silvine; then, with an
expression of compassion on his face, he gave directions that the poor
woman should have her donkey returned to her and be allowed to go in
quest of her husband's body. Stopping only long enough to thank her
benefactor, she and her companion, with the cart trundling after them,
set out for the Fond de Givonne, obedient to the instructions that were
again given them not to pass through Sedan.

After that they bent their course to the left in order to reach the
plateau of Illy by the road that crosses the wood of la Garenne, but
here again they were delayed; twenty times they nearly abandoned all
hope of getting through the wood, so numerous were the obstacles they
encountered. At every step their way was barred by huge trees that had
been laid low by the artillery fire, stretched on the ground like
mighty giants fallen. It was the part of the forest that had suffered so
severely from the cannonade, where the projectiles had plowed their way
through the secular growths as they might have done through a square
of the Old Guard, meeting in either case with the sturdy resistance
of veterans. Everywhere the earth was cumbered with gigantic trunks,
stripped of their leaves and branches, pierced and mangled, even as
mortals might have been, and this wholesale destruction, the sight of
the poor limbs, maimed, slaughtered and weeping tears of sap, inspired
the beholder with the sickening horror of a human battlefield. There
were corpses of men there, too; soldiers, who had stood fraternally by
the trees and fallen with them. A lieutenant, from whose mouth exuded
a bloody froth, had been tearing up the grass by handfuls in his agony,
and his stiffened fingers were still buried in the ground. A little
farther on a captain, prone on his stomach, had raised his head to vent
his anguish in yells and screams, and death had caught and fixed him in
that strange attitude. Others seemed to be slumbering among the herbage,
while a zouave; whose blue sash had taken fire, had had his hair and
beard burned completely from his head. And several times it happened,
as they traversed those woodland glades, that they had to remove a body
from the path before the donkey could p