s they were about to fire,
while close beside them a subaltern had also fallen as he was in the act
of giving the word of command. After that the road led along the brink
of a little ravine, and there they beheld a spectacle that aroused their
horror to the highest pitch as they looked down into the chasm, into
which an entire company seemed to have been blown by the fiery blast;
it was choked with corpses, a landslide, an avalanche of maimed and
mutilated men, bent and twisted in an inextricable tangle, who with
convulsed fingers had caught at the yellow clay of the bank to save
themselves in their descent, fruitlessly. And a dusky flock of ravens
flew away, croaking noisily, and swarms of flies, thousands upon
thousands of them, attracted by the odor of fresh blood, were buzzing
over the bodies and returning incessantly.

"Where is the spot?" Silvine asked again.

They were then passing a plowed field that was completely covered with
knapsacks. It was manifest that some regiment had been roughly handled
there, and the men, in a moment of panic, had relieved themselves
of their burdens. The debris of every sort with which the ground was
thickly strewn served to explain the episodes of the conflict. There was
a stubble field where the scattered _kepis_, resembling huge poppies,
shreds of uniforms, epaulettes, and sword-belts told the story of one of
those infrequent hand-to-hand contests in the fierce artillery duel
that had lasted twelve hours. But the objects that were encountered
most frequently, at every step, in fact, were abandoned weapons, sabers,
bayonets, and, more particularly, chassepots; and so numerous were they
that they seemed to have sprouted from the earth, a harvest that had
matured in a single ill-omened day. Porringers and buckets, also, were
scattered along the roads, together with the heterogeneous contents of
knapsacks, rice, brushes, clothing, cartridges. The fields everywhere
presented an uniform scene of devastation: fences destroyed, trees
blighted as if they had been struck by lightning, the very soil itself
torn by shells, compacted and hardened by the tramp of countless feet,
and so maltreated that it seemed as if seasons must elapse before it
could again become productive. Everything had been drenched and soaked
by the rain of the preceding day; an odor arose and hung in the air
persistently, that odor of the battlefield that smells like fermenting
straw and burning cloth, a mixture of ro