Each grave contained several men. The number of bodies within could be told by the mouldering kepis or rusting helmets hanging on the arms of the cross; the number of the regiments could still be deciphered between the rows of ants crawling over the caps. The wreaths with which affection had adorned some of the sepulchres were blackened and stripped of their leaves. On some of the crucifixes, the names of the dead were still clear, but others were beginning to fade out and soon would be entirely illegible.
"What a horrible death! . . . What glory!" thought Chichi sadly.
Not even the names of the greater part of these vigorous men cut down in the strength of their youth were going to survive! Nothing would remain but the memory which would from time to time overwhelm some old countrywoman driving her cow along the French highway, murmuring between her sobs. "My little one! . . . I wonder where they buried my little one!" Or, perhaps, it would live in the heart of the village woman clad in mourning who did not know how to solve the problem of existence; or in the minds of the children going to school in black blouses and saying with ferocious energy--"When I grow up I am going to kill the Boches to avenge my father's death!"
And Dona Luisa, motionless in her seat, followed with her eyes Chichi's course among the graves, while returning to her interrupted prayer--"Lord, for the mothers without sons . . . for the little ones without fathers! . . . May thy wrath not be turned against us, and may thy smile shine upon us once more!"
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.
They had employed the favorite method of the thesis, antithesis and synthesis in order to demonstrate that Germany ought to be the Mistress of the World; that Belgium was guilty of her own ruin because she had defended herself; that true happiness consisted in having all humanity dominated by Prussia; that the supreme idea of existence consisted in a clean stable and a full manger; that Liberty and Justice were nothing more than illusions of the romanticism of the French; that every deed accomplished became virtuous from the moment it triumphed, and that Right was simply a derivative of Might. These metaphysical athletes with guns and sabres were accustomed to consider themselves the paladins of a crusade of civilization. They wished the blond type to triumph definitely over the brunette; they wished to enslave the worthless man of the South, consigning him forever to a world regulated by "the salt of the earth," "the aristocracy of humanity." Everything on the page of history that had amounted to anything was German.
The ancient Greeks had been of Germanic origin; German, too, the great artists of the Italian Renaissance. The men of the Mediterranean countries, with the inherent badness of their extraction, had falsified history. . . .
"That's the best place for you. . . You are better where you are buried, you pitiless pedants!" thought Desnoyers, recalling his conversations with his friend, the Russian.
