The Downfall eBook

Émile Gaboriau
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 857 pages of information about The Downfall.

The Downfall eBook

Émile Gaboriau
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 857 pages of information about The Downfall.
as they were about to fire, while close beside them a subaltern had also fallen as he was in the act of giving the word of command.  After that the road led along the brink of a little ravine, and there they beheld a spectacle that aroused their horror to the highest pitch as they looked down into the chasm, into which an entire company seemed to have been blown by the fiery blast; it was choked with corpses, a landslide, an avalanche of maimed and mutilated men, bent and twisted in an inextricable tangle, who with convulsed fingers had caught at the yellow clay of the bank to save themselves in their descent, fruitlessly.  And a dusky flock of ravens flew away, croaking noisily, and swarms of flies, thousands upon thousands of them, attracted by the odor of fresh blood, were buzzing over the bodies and returning incessantly.

“Where is the spot?” Silvine asked again.

They were then passing a plowed field that was completely covered with knapsacks.  It was manifest that some regiment had been roughly handled there, and the men, in a moment of panic, had relieved themselves of their burdens.  The debris of every sort with which the ground was thickly strewn served to explain the episodes of the conflict.  There was a stubble field where the scattered kepis, resembling huge poppies, shreds of uniforms, epaulettes, and sword-belts told the story of one of those infrequent hand-to-hand contests in the fierce artillery duel that had lasted twelve hours.  But the objects that were encountered most frequently, at every step, in fact, were abandoned weapons, sabers, bayonets, and, more particularly, chassepots; and so numerous were they that they seemed to have sprouted from the earth, a harvest that had matured in a single ill-omened day.  Porringers and buckets, also, were scattered along the roads, together with the heterogeneous contents of knapsacks, rice, brushes, clothing, cartridges.  The fields everywhere presented an uniform scene of devastation:  fences destroyed, trees blighted as if they had been struck by lightning, the very soil itself torn by shells, compacted and hardened by the tramp of countless feet, and so maltreated that it seemed as if seasons must elapse before it could again become productive.  Everything had been drenched and soaked by the rain of the preceding day; an odor arose and hung in the air persistently, that odor of the battlefield that smells like fermenting straw and burning cloth, a mixture of rottenness and gunpowder.

Silvine, who was beginning to weary of those fields of death over which she had tramped so many long miles, looked about her with increasing distrust and uneasiness.

“Where is the spot? where is it?”

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Downfall from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.