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. . . .  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.