And he sharply stopped Séverine just as she was going to tread on an arm cut off at the shoulder, which was still clothed in a blue cloth sleeve. She started back in horror. And yet she did not recognise the sleeve. It was an unknown arm that had rolled there from a body they would doubtless find elsewhere. This gave her such a fit of trembling that she seemed as if paralysed, standing weeping, watching the others working, incapable even of removing the splinters of glass which cut her hands. Then the rescue of the dying, the search for the dead proved full of anguish and danger, for the live coal had set the pieces of wood alight, and to put a stop to this commencement of a fire it became necessary to throw shovels of earth over them. While someone ran to Barentin to ask for assistance, and a telegram left for Rouen, the removal of the wreckage proceeded as briskly as possible, everyone putting a hand to the work with great courage. Many of the runaways had returned, ashamed of their panic. But the relief party had to advance with infinite precautions, the transfer of each bit of wreckage requiring the utmost care, for fears were entertained lest the heap might perchance collapse and finish off the poor wretches in its midst. Some of the wounded emerged from the pile, still buried up to their chests, crushed as if in a vice, and howling. The rescuers laboured a quarter of an hour to deliver one victim as white as a sheet, who, far from complaining, said he felt no pain, and had nothing the matter with him; but when he had been extricated, he was found to be without his legs, and expired immediately, having neither seen nor felt the horrible mutilation in his fit of fright. An entire family were dragged from a second-class compartment that had caught fire: the father and mother wounded in the knees, the grandmother with a broken arm; but neither did they feel their injuries. They were sobbing and calling their little girl who had disappeared in the smash--a fair-headed mite, barely three years old, who was discovered safe and sound under a strip of roofing with a merry, smiling face. Another little girl drenched in blood and with her poor, tiny hands crushed, had been carried aside pending the discovery of her parents. She remained alone and unknown, breathing with such difficulty that she could not utter a word; but her face was convulsed into an expression of ineffable terror as soon as anyone approached her.