She suddenly became very pale again, and an expression of agitation swept over her face. Glancing involuntarily in the direction of the room where Charlot was asleep, and waving her hand as if to drive away some frightful vision, she muttered: 'The Prussians, yes--yes, I have seen them.'
Then, worn out with fatigue, she sank upon a chair, and related that on the invasion of Raucourt by the Seventh Corps she had sought refuge at the house of Dr. Dalichamp, her godfather, hoping that Fouchard would think of fetching her before he started home. Such was the hustling and confusion in the high street that a dog would not have ventured there. She had waited patiently, and without feeling much uneasiness, till four o'clock, employing her time meanwhile in helping several ladies to prepare some lint; for, in the idea that some of the wounded from Metz and Verdun, supposing there were any fighting over there, would be sent on to Raucourt, the doctor had been busily engaged for a fortnight past in installing an ambulance at the town-hall. Some people came who asserted that this ambulance might be required at once; and in point of fact a cannonade had been heard since noon in the direction of Beaumont. Still, that was some distance away, and nobody felt alarmed. Suddenly, however, just as the last French soldiers were on the point of leaving Raucourt a shell plunged, with a fearful crash, through the roof of a neighbouring house. Two others followed--a German battery was cannonading the rear guard of the Seventh Army Corps. Some wounded men from Beaumont having already been brought to the town-hall, it was feared that a shell might fall upon them, and finish them off on the straw mattresses on which they were lying waiting for the doctor to attend to them. Maddened by terror these unfortunate men rose up, and despite their broken limbs, which drew from them loud cries of agony, insisted on crawling into the cellar, which they considered to be the only safe place.
'And then,' continued Silvine. 'I don't know how it happened, but all at once everything became silent--I had gone upstairs to a window overlooking the street and the country, and I could no longer see anyone, not a single French soldier. But suddenly I heard a heavy tramp. Somebody called out something I did not understand, and then the butt-ends of a number of muskets fell with a thud on the ground. In the street down below there were a lot of dark-looking men, short and grimed with dirt, with huge, hideous heads and wearing helmets like those that our firemen wear. I was told they were Bavarians. Then, as I raised my eyes, I saw--oh! I saw thousands and thousands of them, coming along by the roads and the fields and the woods, in close columns which never seemed to end. The whole country-side at once became quite black with them. It was like a swarm of black locusts coming and coming in such numbers that in less than no time I could no longer see the ground.'