It was a gruesome sight. There lay a skeleton face downwards, a woman by the lines—an old woman by the coarse fibre of the bone. Between the ribs rose a long spike-like dagger made from a butcher’s sharpening knife, its keen point buried in the spine.
“You will observe,” said the commissary to the officer and to me as he took out his note book, “that the woman must have fallen on her dagger. The rats are many here—see their eyes glistening among that heap of bones—and you will also notice”—I shuddered as he placed his hand on the skeleton—“that but little time was lost by them, for the bones are scarcely cold!”
There was no other sign of any one near, living or dead; and so deploying again into line the soldiers passed on. Presently we came to the hut made of the old wardrobe. We approached. In five of the six compartments was an old man sleeping—sleeping so soundly that even the glare of the lanterns did not wake them. Old and grim and grizzled they looked, with their gaunt, wrinkled, bronzed faces and their white moustaches.
The officer called out harshly and loudly a word of command, and in an instant each one of them was on his feet before us and standing at “attention!”
“Where are the other chiffoniers?” asked the commissary.
“Peste!” laughed the officer grimly, as he looked at the old men one after the other in the face and added with cool deliberate cruelty: “Asleep on duty! Is this the manner of the Old Guard? No wonder, then, a Waterloo!”
By the gleam of the lantern I saw the grim old faces grow deadly pale, and almost shuddered at the look in the eyes of the old men as the laugh of the soldiers echoed the grim pleasantry of the officer.
I felt in that moment that I was in some measure avenged.
For a moment they looked as if they would throw themselves on the taunter, but years of their life had schooled them and they remained still.
“You are but five,” said the commissary; “where is the sixth?” The answer came with a grim chuckle.
“He is there!” and the speaker pointed to the bottom of the wardrobe. “He died last night. You won’t find much of him. The burial of the rats is quick!”
The commissary stooped and looked in. Then he turned to the officer and said calmly: