Hullin was in such a state of delight that he was no longer like the same man. His martial instincts--the recollection of the camp, the march, the fire, and the battle--all returned at full speed; his eye sparkled, his heart beat quicker, and already ideas of defence, entrenchments, death-struggles, whirled rapidly through his brain. "Upon my word!" said he to himself, "all this looks well! I have made sabots enough in my life-time; and since I have a chance of shouldering a musket again, well and good!--so much the better; we will show the Prussians and Austrians that we have not forgotten our old trade." So reasoned the brave man, carried away by warlike recollections; but his joy was not of long duration. In the square in front of the church were stationed fifteen or twenty carts filled with the wounded that kept arriving from Leipzig and Hanau. These unfortunates--pale, wan, with fast glazing eye; some whose limbs had been already amputated, others whose wounds had not been even dressed--were patiently awaiting death. Beside them stood some old, worn-out horses, munching their meagre allowance; while their drivers, poor devils taken into employ at Alsace, wrapped in their ragged cloaks, were sleeping, with their hats pulled over their brows, and their arms folded across their breasts, on the steps of the church. It made one shudder to see these wretched groups of human beings, in their large gray coats, as they lay jumbled together upon the bloody straw; one supporting his broken arm upon his knees; another with his head bandaged with an old handkerchief; a third, already dead, serving as a seat for the living--his blackened hands hanging over the side of the cart. Hullin stood rooted to the ground in the presence of this dismal spectacle. He could not turn his eyes aside. It is in the power of great human griefs to fascinate us thus; we have a morbid wish to see how men perish--how they face death: the best of us are not free from this frightful curiosity. It seems as if eternity was revealing its secrets to us.