. . for the little ones
without fathers! . . . May thy wrath not be turned against us, and may
thy smile shine upon us once more!"
Her husband, shrunken in his seat, was also looking over the funereal
fields, but his eyes were fixed most tenaciously on some mounds without
wreaths or flags, simple crosses with a little board bearing the
briefest inscription. These were the German bodies which seemed to have
a page to themselves in the Book of Death. On one side, the
innumerable French tombs with inscriptions as small as possible, simple
numbers--one, two, three dead. On the other, in each of the spacious,
unadorned sepulchres, great quantities of soldiers, with a number
of terrifying terseness. Fences of wooden strips, narrow and wide,
surrounded these latter ditches filled to the top with bodies. The earth
was as bleached as though covered with snow or saltpetre. This was the
lime returning to mix with the land. The crosses raised above these huge
mounds bore each an inscription stating that it contained Germans, and
then a number--200 . . . 300 . . . 400.
Such appalling figures obliged Desnoyers to exert his imagination.
It was not easy to evoke with exactitude the vision of three hundred
carcasses in helmets, boots and cloaks, in all the revolting aspects of
death, piled in rows as though they were bricks, locked forever in the
depths of a great trench.
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