ttenness and gunpowder.

Silvine, who was beginning to weary of those fields of death over which
she had tramped so many long miles, looked about her with increasing
distrust and uneasiness.

"Where is the spot? where is it?"

But Prosper made no answer; he also was becoming uneasy. What distressed
him even more than the sights of suffering among his fellow-soldiers was
the dead horses, the poor brutes that lay outstretched upon their side,
that were met with in great numbers. Many of them presented a most
pitiful spectacle, in all sorts of harrowing attitudes, with heads torn
from the body, with lacerated flanks from which the entrails protruded.
Many were resting on their back, with their four feet elevated in the
air like signals of distress. The entire extent of the broad plain was
dotted with them. There were some that death had not released after
their two days' agony; at the faintest sound they would raise their
head, turning it eagerly from right to left, then let it fall again upon
the ground, while others lay motionless and momentarily gave utterance
to that shrill scream which one who has heard it can never forget, the
lament of the dying horse, so piercingly mournful that earth and heaven
seemed to shudder in unison with it. And Prosper, with a bleeding heart,
thought of poor Zephyr, and told himself that perhaps he might see him
once again.

Suddenly he became aware that the ground was trembling under the
thundering hoof-beats of a headlong charge. He turned to look, and had
barely time to shout to his companion:

"The horses, the horses! Get behind that wall!"

From the summit of a neighboring eminence a hundred riderless horses,
some of them still bearing the saddle and master's kit, were plunging
down upon them at break-neck speed. They were cavalry mounts that had
lost their masters and remained on the battlefield, and instinct had
counseled them to associate together in a band. They had had neither
hay nor oats for two days, and had cropped the scanty grass from off the
plain, shorn the hedge-rows of leaves and twigs, gnawed the bark from
the trees, and when they felt the pangs of hunger pricking at their
vitals like a keen spur, they started all together at a mad gallop and
charged across the deserted, silent fields, crushing the dead out of all
human shape, extinguishing the last spark of life in the wounded.

The band came on like a whirlwind; Silvine had only time to pull the
donkey and car