It was a lucky thing for Don Marcelo that he had lingered a few moments
on the bank of the fosse, sheltered by the bulk of the edifice. The fire
of the hidden battery passed the length of the avenue, carrying off the
living, destroying for a second time the dead, killing horses, breaking
the wheels of vehicles and making the gun carriages fly through the air
with the flames of a volcano in whose red and bluish depths black bodies
were leaping. He saw hundreds of fallen men; he saw disembowelled horses
trampling on their entrails. The death harvest was not being reaped in
sheaves; the entire field was being mowed down with a single flash
of the sickle. And as though the batteries opposite divined the
catastrophe, they redoubled their fire, sending down a torrent of
shells. They fell on all sides. Beyond the castle, at the end of the
park, craters were opening in the woods, vomiting forth the entire
trunks of trees. The projectiles were hurling from their pits the bodies
interred the night before.
Those still alive were firing through the gaps in the walls. Then they
sprang up with the greatest haste. Some grasped their bayonets, pale,
with clamped lips and a mad glare in their eyes; others turned their
backs, running toward the exit from the park, regardless of the shouts
of their officers and the revolver shots sent after the fugitives.
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