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By Root 2011 0

she found herself on the actual position of the battery. It was appalling, the very ground was ploughed up as if there had been an earthquake, with wreckage strewn everywhere and dead men blown in all directions in frightful postures, with twisted arms, legs bent back, heads awry, yelling with wide open mouths showing all their white teeth. A corporal had died with his hands over his eyes, clenched in terror, trying not to see. Some gold coins a lieutenant had had in a money-belt had come out with his blood and entrails. The ‘married couple’, Adolphe the driver and Louis the gun-layer, were lying one on top of the other with their eyes out of their sockets and were locked in a fierce embrace, united in death. And there at last was Honoré, stretched out on his crippled gun as though lying in state, his side and one shoulder mangled but his face intact and beautiful in its anger, still looking out towards the Prussian batteries.

‘Oh my darling,’ Silvine moaned, ‘my darling…’

She fell on her knees on the wet ground and joined her hands in a spasm of wild grief. This word darling, the only one she could find, expressed the love she had lost, this man who in his goodness had forgiven her and consented to take her for his wife in spite of everything. Now her hope was at an end and she would cease to be really alive. She had never loved another and would love him for ever. The rain was giving over, and a flight of crows cawing above the three trees frightened her like some evil menace. Was her beloved dead, recovered with such difficulty, to be taken from her again? She dragged herself over on her knees and with a trembling hand drove away the greedy flies buzzing above the wide open eyes she still hoped would look at her.

Then she caught sight of a bloodstained piece of paper clutched in Honoré’s fingers, and anxiously tried to pull it out in little jerks. The dead man refused to give it up and held on so tight that it could only have been torn away in pieces. It was the letter she had written him, that he had kept between his skin and his shirt, and he had squeezed it in his hand for a farewell in death’s final convulsion. Recognizing it, she was filled with a deep joy in the midst of her grief and quite overwhelmed by this proof that he had died thinking of her. Oh yes, yes, she would let him keep the beloved letter, and not take it from him as he was so determined to take it with him into the earth. A fresh outburst of weeping brought her some relief, for her tears were warm and sweet now. She stood up, kissed his hands and his forehead, repeating the one word of infinite love:

‘My darling, my darling.’

But the sun was going down, and Prosper had gone and brought the coverlet, and spread it on the ground. Slowly and respectfully they lifted Honoré’s body, laid him on this, wrapped it round him and carried him to the cart. The rain was threatening to start again, and they were setting off once more with the donkey, a sad little procession across the malignant plain, when they heard a distant rumbling of thunder. Again Prosper cried:

‘The horses! The horses!’

It was another charge of the horses roaming at large and famished. This time they were coming across a huge flat field in a solid mass, manes flying and nostrils flecked with foam, and a slanting ray of the red sun sent the shadow of their frantic race right across the plain. Silvine at once threw herself in front of the trap with her arms in the air as though to stop them with a gesture of fury and fear. Mercifully they swerved to the left, turned aside by the slope of the land. They would have pounded everything to pieces. The earth shook and their hoofs sent up a shower of stones like a hail of shrapnel that hurt the donkey’s head. Then they vanished into a deep ravine.

‘Hunger is spurring them on,’ cried Prosper. ‘Poor creatures!’

Silvine bandaged the donkey’s ear with a handkerchief and took the bridle again. The little funeral procession re-crossed the plain in the opposite direction to start the two leagues between them and Remilly. At every step Prosper