While they have been singing their Marseillaise Hymn, we
have been thinking. While they have been talking, we have been
working."
Next he escorted us back along the small plateau that extended south
from the face of the bluff. We made our way through a constantly
growing confusion of abandoned equipment and garments--all the flotsam
and jetsam of a rout. I suppose we saw as many as fifty smashed French
rifles, as many as a hundred and fifty canteens and knapsacks.
Crossing a sunken road, where trenches for riflemen to kneel in and fire
from had been dug in the sides of the bank--a road our guide said was
full of dead men after the fight--we came very soon to the site of the
French camp. Here, from the medley and mixture of an indescribable
jumble of wreckage, certain objects stand out, as I write this, detached
and plain in my mind; such things, for example, as a straw basket of
twelve champagne bottles with two bottles full and ten empty; a box of
lump sugar, broken open, with a stain of spilled red wine on some of the
white cubes; a roll of new mattresses jammed into a natural receptacle
at the root of an oak tree; a saber hilt of shining brass with the blade
missing; a whole set of pewter knives and forks sown broadcast on the
bruised and trampled grass.
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