A dirty brown trail, trodden and churned by the main army and again frozen hard, gave them the course of the road as it zig-zagged into the ravine; but, even had the snow obliterated the track, the regiments could have found their way by the dead bodies strewing it--bodies of men, of horses, even of women and children--some heaped by the wind's eddies with thick coverlets of white, so that their forms could only be guessed; others half sunk, with a glazing of thin ice over upturned faces and wide-open eyes; others again flung in stiff contortions across the very road--here a man with his fists clenched to his ribs, there a horse on its back with all four legs in air, crooked, and rigid as poles. The most of these horses had belonged to the dragoons, who, after leading them to the last, had been forced to slaughter them: for the poor brutes cast their shoes on the rough track, and the forage-carts with the cavalry contained neither spare shoes nor nails. The women and children, with sick stragglers and plunderers, had made up that horrible, shameful tail-pipe which every retreating army drags in its wake--a crowd to which the reserve had for weeks acted as whippers-in, herding them through Bembibre, Calcabellos, Villa Franca, Nogales; driving them out of wine-shops; shaking, pricking, clubbing them from drunken stupor into panic; pushing them forward through the snow until they collapsed in it to stagger up no more. Strewn between the corpses along the wayside lay broken carts and cartwheels, bundles, knapsacks, muskets, shakos, split boots, kettles, empty wine-flasks--whatever the weaker had dropped and the stronger had found not worth the gleaning.