Desnoyers noticed that the artillerymen rapidly unharnessed them, pushing them out of the road so as to leave the way open for the rest.

There lay the skeleton-like frames with stiffened legs and glassy eyes staring fixedly at the first flies already attracted by their miserable carrion.
The cannons painted gray, the gun-carriages, the artillery equipment, all that Don Marcelo had seen clean and shining with the enthusiastic friction that man has given to arms from remote epochs--even more persistent than that which woman gives to household utensils--were now dirty, overlaid with the marks of endless use, with the wreckage of unavoidable neglect.

The wheels were deformed with mud, the metal darkened by the smoke of explosion, the gray paint spotted with mossy dampness.
In the free spaces in this file, in the parentheses opened between battery and regiment, were sandwiched crowds of civilians--miserable groups driven on by the invasion, populations of entire towns that had disintegrated, following the army in its retreat.

The approach of a new division would make them leave the road temporarily, continuing their march in the adjoining fields.

Then at the slightest opening in the troops they would again slip along the white and even surface of the highway.