o in whose red and bluish depths black bodies
were leaping. He saw hundreds of fallen men; he saw disembowelled horses
trampling on their entrails. The death harvest was not being reaped in
sheaves; the entire field was being mowed down with a single flash
of the sickle. And as though the batteries opposite divined the
catastrophe, they redoubled their fire, sending down a torrent of
shells. They fell on all sides. Beyond the castle, at the end of the
park, craters were opening in the woods, vomiting forth the entire
trunks of trees. The projectiles were hurling from their pits the bodies
interred the night before.

Those still alive were firing through the gaps in the walls. Then they
sprang up with the greatest haste. Some grasped their bayonets, pale,
with clamped lips and a mad glare in their eyes; others turned their
backs, running toward the exit from the park, regardless of the shouts
of their officers and the revolver shots sent after the fugitives.

All this occurred with dizzying rapidity, like a nightmare. On the other
side of the wall came a murmur, swelling in volume, like that of the
sea. Desnoyers heard shouts, and it seemed to him that some hoarse,
discordant voices were singing the Marseillaise. The machine-guns were
working with the swift steadiness of sewing machines. The attack was
going to be opposed with furious resistance. The Germans, crazed
with fury, shot and shot. In one of the breaches appeared a red kepis
followed by legs of the same color trying to clamber over the ruins. But
this vision was instantly blotted out by the sprinkling from the machine
guns, making the invaders fall in great heaps on the other side of the
wall. Don Marcelo never knew exactly how the change took place. Suddenly
he saw the red trousers within the park. With irresistible bounds they
were springing over the wall, slipping through the yawning gaps, and
darting out from the depths of the woods by invisible paths. They were
little soldiers, husky, panting, perspiring, with torn cloaks; and
mingled with them, in the disorder of the charge, African marksmen with
devilish eyes and foaming mouths, Zouaves in wide breeches and chasseurs
in blue uniforms.

The German officers wanted to die. With upraised swords, after having
exhausted the shots in their revolvers, they advanced upon their
assailants followed by the soldiers who still obeyed them. There was a
scuffle, a wild melee. To the trembling spectator, it seemed as t