They hastened to the spot, leaving a couple of servant-girls to continue making the linen-rollers. The attendants, who had taken the captain out of the carriage, carried him into the drying-room, and were about to lay him on some straw there, when, upon one of the mattresses, Delaherche perceived a soldier with ashy face and open eyes, who no longer stirred. 'I say, that fellow's dead!' the manufacturer exclaimed. 'So he is,' muttered an attendant. 'We'll get rid of him and make room for that officer.' Thereupon he and a comrade took up the corpse and carried it to the charnel-place behind the laburnums. There were already a dozen dead men lying there, stiffened in the last rattle, some with their feet stretched out as though distended by suffering, others all awry, twisted into atrocious postures. There were some showing only the whites of their eyes, and sneering, with their lips turned outwardly and displaying their white teeth; whilst several, upon whose drawn, elongated faces there lingered a fearfully mournful expression, were yet shedding big tears. One skinny, youthful little fellow, whose head had been split open, was convulsively pressing a woman's portrait--a common, faded, blood-smeared photograph--to his heart. And, pell-mell, at the feet of the corpses, were piled the amputated legs and arms, everything that was cut away, hewn off on the operating tables--the parings of flesh and bone of a butcher's shop, swept, as it were, into a corner. Gilberte had shuddered at sight of Captain Beaudoin. Good God! how pale he was, lying on that mattress there, his face quite white under the filth that soiled it. And she was frozen with appalment, remembering that but a few hours previously he had been full of life. She fell upon her knees: 'What a misfortune, my friend! But it's nothing dangerous, is it?' She had pulled out her handkerchief in a mechanical fashion, and wiped his face with it, unable to tolerate him in that dirty state, grimed with earth, gunpowder, and sweat. It seemed to her also that by cleansing him a little, she gave him some relief: 'It is not dangerous, is it? It's only your leg.' Emerging from a kind of somnolence the captain painfully opened his eyes, and, recognising his friends, he tried to smile at them: 'Yes, only my leg; I did not even feel the blow, I thought I had slipped and was falling.' He had to pause, for he could only speak with difficulty: 'Oh! I'm so thirsty,' he added, 'so thirsty.' Thereupon, old Madame Delaherche, who was leaning over him on the other side of the mattress, went off in all haste to fetch a glass and a decanter of water with which a small quantity of cognac had been mixed. And when the captain had eagerly drained the glass, she had to divide what remained in the decanter among the wounded near by; every hand was outstretched, and ardent voices supplicated her. A Zouave, for whom there was none left, began to sob.