The Prussian glanced at him as he passed, but said nothing.
Soon he and his horsemen passed out of sight in the dusk.
John, wondering how late it might be, suddenly remembered that he had a
watch and found it was eleven o'clock.
"An hour of midnight," he said to Fleury.
Most all the French stretched upon the ground were now in deep slumber,
wounded and unwounded alike. The sounds of cannon fire were sinking
away, but they did not die wholly. The faint thunder of the distant
guns never ceased to come. But the campfire, where he knew the German
generals slept or planned, went out, and darkness trailed its length
over all this land which by night had become a wilderness.
John was able to trace dimly the sleeping figures of Germans in the
dusk, sunk down upon the ground and buried in the sleep or stupor of
exhaustion. As they lay near him so they lay in the same way in hundreds
of thousands along the vast line. Men and horses, strained to their last
nerve and muscle, were too tired to move. It seemed as if more than a
million men lay dead in the fields and woods of Northeastern France.
John, who had been wide awake, suddenly dropped on the ground where the
others were stretched. He collapsed all in a moment, as if every drop of
blood had been drained suddenly from his body. Keyed high throughout the
day, his whole system now gave way before the accumulated impact of
events so tremendous. The silence save for the distant moaning that
succeeded the roar of a million men or more in battle was like a
powerful drug, and he slept like one dead, never moving hand or foot.
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