A battalion of yagers, the pride of the Austrian army, charged up the fatal hill and succeeded in taking it, after which the rattle of musketry beyond announced that the fight was being continued on the farther side.
At this point Manasseh's battalion was ordered to hold the hill while the yagers were pushed farther forward.

The order was obeyed, and then Manasseh learned what the cypress-crowned height really was: it was a cemetery, the burial-ground of the surrounding district, and each cypress marked a grave.

But the dead under the sod lay not more closely packed than the fallen soldiers with whose bodies the place was covered.
Cypress Hill was a double graveyard, heaped with dead and dying Frenchmen, Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, and Croatians, their bodies disfigured and bleeding and heaped in chaotic confusion over the mounds beneath which slept the regular occupants of the place.
In the soldier's march to glory each step is a human corpse.

Manasseh took care to step over and between the prostrate forms before him.
Gaining the summit of the hill, he had an open view of the prospect beyond.

A large farm, since known to history as the _Madonna della Scoperta_, lay before him.