d now, I saw, I understood. The plain spread out naked and
deserted, all white in the broad sunlight. It exhibited its desolation
beneath the intense serenity of heaven; heaps of corpses were sleeping in
the warmth, and the trees that had been brought down, seemed to be other
dead who were dying. There was not a breath of air. A frightful silence
came from those piles of inanimate bodies; then, at times, there were
dismal groans which broke this silence, and conveyed a long tremor to it.
Slender clouds of grey smoke hanging over the low hills on the horizon,
was all that broke the bright blue of the sky. The butchery was continuing
on the heights.

I imagined we were conquerors, and I experienced selfish pleasure in
thinking I could die in peace on this deserted plain. Around me the earth
was black. On raising my head I saw the enemy's battery on which we had
charged, a few feet away from me. The struggle must have been horrible:
the mound was covered with hacked and disfigured bodies; blood had flowed
so abundantly that the dust seemed like a large red carpet. The cannon
stretched out their dark muzzles above the corpses. I shuddered when I
observed the silence of those guns.

Then gently, with a multitude of precautions, I succeeded in turning on my
stomach. I rested my head on a large stone all splashed with gore, and
drew my uncle Lazare's letter from my breast. I placed it before my eyes;
but my tears prevented my reading it.

And whilst the sun was roasting me in the back, the acrid smell of blood
was choking me. I could form an idea of the woeful plain around me, and
was as if stiffened with the rigidness of the dead. My poor heart was
weeping in the warm and loathsome silence of murder.

Uncle Lazare wrote to me:

"My Dear Boy,--I hear war has been declared; but I still hope you will get
your discharge before the campaign opens. Every morning I beseech the
Almighty to spare you new dangers; He will grant my prayer; He will, one
of these days, let you close my eyes.

"Ah! my poor Jean, I am becoming old, I have great need of your arm. Since
your departure I no more feel your youthfulness beside me, which gave me
back my twenty summers. Do you remember our strolls in the morning along
the oak-tree walk? Now I no longer dare to go beneath those trees; I am
alone, I am afraid. The Durance weeps. Come quickly and console me,
assuage my anxiety----"

The tears were choking me, I could not continue. At that mome