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Besides what I have named, there was not another thing in that great, stone-vaulted, empty chamber but lockfast chests arranged along the wall and a corner cupboard with a padlock. As soon as the last chain was up, the man rejoined me. He was a mean, stooping, narrow-shouldered, clay-faced creature; and his age might have been anything between fifty and seventy.

Besides what I have named, there was not another thing in that great, stone-vaulted, empty chamber but lockfast chests arranged along the wall and a corner-cupboard with a padlock. As soon as the last chain was up, the man rejoined me. He was a mean, stooping, narrow-shouldered, clay-faced creature; and his age might have been anything between fifty and seventy.

He stood in the midst of these tottering and clay-faced marionettes; he was surrounded by their cries; but their whole soul was fixed on the dead carcass; even those who were too weak to move, lay, half-turned over, with their eyes riveted upon the bear; and my father, seeing himself stand as though invisible in the thick of this dreary hubbub, was seized with a desire to weep.

The routine varied but little: at dawn surgeons' call chorused by the bugles; files of haggard, limping, clay-faced men, headed by sergeants, all converging toward the hospital; later, in every camp, drums awaking; distant strains of regimental bands at parade; and all day and all night the far rumble of railroad trains, the whistle of locomotives, and, if the wind veered, the faint, melancholy cadence of the bells swinging for a clear track and right of way.