Silvine entered the house, the doors and windows of which had been battered in and afforded admission to the damp, cold air from without.  It was clear enough that there was no one there; the masters must have taken their departure before the battle.  She continued to prosecute her search, however, and had entered the kitchen, when she gave utterance to another cry of terror.  Beneath the sink were two bodies, fast locked in each other’s arms in mortal embrace, one of them a zouave, a handsome, brown-bearded man, the other a huge Prussian with red hair.  The teeth of the former were set in the latter’s cheek, their arms, stiff in death, had not relaxed their terrible hug, binding the pair with such a bond of everlasting hate and fury that ultimately it was found necessary to bury them in a common grave.

Then Prosper made haste to lead Silvine away, since they could accomplish nothing in that house where Death had taken up his abode, and upon their return, despairing, to the post where the donkey and cart had been detained, it so chanced that they found, in company with the officer who had treated them so harshly, a general on his way to visit the battlefield.  This gentleman requested to be allowed to see the pass, which he examined attentively and restored to Silvine; then, with an expression of compassion on his face, he gave directions that the poor woman should have her donkey returned to her and be allowed to go in quest of her husband’s body.  Stopping only long enough to thank her benefactor, she and her companion, with the cart trundling after them, set out for the Fond de Givonne, obedient to the instructions that were again given them not to pass through Sedan.

After that they bent their course to the left in order to reach the plateau of Illy by the road that crosses the wood of la Garenne, but here again they were delayed; twenty times they nearly abandoned all hope of getting through the wood, so numerous were the obstacles they encountered.  At every step their way was barred by huge trees that had been laid low by the artillery fire, stretched on the ground like mighty giants fallen.  It was the part of the forest that had suffered so severely from the cannonade, where the projectiles had plowed their way through the secular growths as they might have done through a square of the Old Guard, meeting in either case with the sturdy resistance of veterans.  Everywhere the earth was cumbered with gigantic trunks, stripped of their leaves and branches, pierced and mangled, even as mortals might have been, and this wholesale destruction, the sight of the poor limbs, maimed, slaughtered and weeping tears of sap, inspired the beholder with the sickening horror of a human battlefield.  There were corpses of men there, too; soldiers, who had stood fraternally by the trees and fallen with them.  A lieutenant, from whose mouth exuded a bloody froth, had been tearing up the grass by handfuls in his agony, and his stiffened