Page:The four horsemen of the Apocalypse - (Los cuatro jinetes de Apocalipsis) (IA cu31924014386738).djvu/493

 ory 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 Doña Luisa, motionless in her seat, followed with her eyes Chichí'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 sepulchre's, great quantities of soldiers, with a number of terrifying terseness. Fences of wooden strips, narrow and wide, surrounded these latter ditches filled to the tops 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