. . . And this funereal alignment was repeated
at intervals all over the great immensity of the plain!
The mere sight of them filled Don Marcelo with a kind of savage joy, as
his mourning fatherhood tasted the fleeting consolation of vengeance.
Julio had died, and he was going to die, too, not having strength to
survive his bitter woe; but how many hundreds of the enemy wasting in
these awful trenches were also leaving in the world loved beings who
would remember them as he was remembering his son! . . .
He imagined them as they must have been before the death call sounded,
as he had seen them in the advance around his castle.
Some of them, the most prominent and terrifying, probably still showed
on their faces the theatrical cicatrices of their university duels. They
were the soldiers who carried books in their knapsacks, and after the
fusillade of a lot of country folk, or the sacking and burning of a
hamlet, devoted themselves to reading the poets and philosophers by
the glare of the blaze which they had kindled. They were bloated with
science as with the puffiness of a toad, proud of their pedantic and
all-sufficient intellectuality. Sons of sophistry and grandsons of
cant, they had considered themselves capable of proving the greatest
absurdities by the mental capers to which they had accustomed their
acrobatic intellects.
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