While they have been talking, we have been working." Next he escorted us back along the small plateau that extended south from the face of the bluff.

We made our way through a constantly growing confusion of abandoned equipment and garments--all the flotsam and jetsam of a rout.

I suppose we saw as many as fifty smashed French rifles, as many as a hundred and fifty canteens and knapsacks.
Crossing a sunken road, where trenches for riflemen to kneel in and fire from had been dug in the sides of the bank--a road our guide said was full of dead men after the fight--we came very soon to the site of the French camp.

Here, from the medley and mixture of an indescribable jumble of wreckage, certain objects stand out, as I write this, detached and plain in my mind; such things, for example, as a straw basket of twelve champagne bottles with two bottles full and ten empty; a box of lump sugar, broken open, with a stain of spilled red wine on some of the white cubes; a roll of new mattresses jammed into a natural receptacle at the root of an oak tree; a saber hilt of shining brass with the blade missing; a whole set of pewter knives and forks sown broadcast on the bruised and trampled grass.

But there was no German relic in the lot -- you may be sure of that.