Under their wide-brimmed straw hats and behind their distinctive beards, there was not a twitch of emotion or a single expression of grief yesterday as their horse-drawn buggies made their way down the narrow stone lanes and through the cornfields of Nickel Mines.

Down the hill, in a beautiful gully filled with the smell of wild garlic, stood the one-room schoolhouse where ten of their little girls, feet and hands tied, had been lined up against a blackboard and shot through the head less then 24 hours before.

But in this hamlet of 27 homes and one church, there were no pictures of the victims to see yesterday — the Amish forbid photography. There were no relatives weeping to camera, describing their grief. There were no publicity agents lining up interviews with Oprah Winfrey, or family spokesmen releasing names. There was nothing — except a quiet, but enormously powerful, public stoicism.

America has had school massacres before, but never an aftermath as uniquely strange as this one. The day after the attack that left five girls aged between 7 and 13 in hospital mortuaries, their faces horribly disfigured by the bullets that killed them, and another five terribly injured, the Amish who live here took their remaining children to schools by buggy — and then retired quietly to their homes to pray: both for the victims, and for Charles Roberts, the man who shot them before turning his 9mm semi-automatic pistol on himself.

Rita Rhoads, a midwife present at the birth of most of the girls shot on Monday morning, said: “They are grieving, but they are not angry.” Two of the girls who died, Mary Liz Miller, 8, and Lina Miller, 7, were sisters. Another family lost their only daughter. Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is dead. Her sister remains in a critical condition. “But they are not looking for vengeance. They just wonder why, ” Ms Rhoads said.

Nickel Mines is little more than a crossroads: a cluster of stone houses, an auction house, and a Mennonite church, surrounded by cornfields, grain silos and vast, hand-built Dutch barns. It was settled in 1744, and for 260 years life has meandered along, largely unchanged.

The Amish do not use machines, and farm work is still done by hand. There are few telephones, and no televisions. They do not drive cars.

The Amish who live here are conservative, deeply pacifist and revere God. They dress like their German peasant forbears, the men in straw hats, braces and boots, the women in plain dresses and bonnets.

After marriage, husbands are allowed to grow beards, but moustaches are forbidden, because the Amish associate them with soldiers. Family, and especially children, are the centrepiece of Amish life.

At 16, boys are allowed to mingle for a time with the “English” — the non-Amish community — but nearly all return.

Remarkably, the Amish community of Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania, has doubled every 20 years. In 1960 there were 6,000 Amish in Lancaster area. Today there are 28,000.

In Nickel Mines, they are not only trying to come to terms with the most violent day in their long history, but also the aggressive attentions of a modern world that they shun.

Along White Oak Road, the lane that runs through the village, buggies and boys on bicycles pushed along by foot because they have been stripped of pedals, had to negotiate 60 television satellite trucks, miles of electrical cable, hundreds of cameras, the shrill rings of mobile phones, men in baseball caps drinking McDonald’s coffee and the chugging of generators. It was an extraordinary clash of ancient and modern.

Even as the parents tried to discover if their girls were dead or alive, they refused police offers to be flown to the hospitals where their daughters had been taken. They would only be driven.

Once they arrived, the scene in the hospital lobbies was extraordinary: men in cloth jackets and boaters, anxiously stroking their beards, being ushered into trauma rooms filled with the world’s most advanced medical technology.

At one hospital, in Delaware, one set of parents was taken to see the wrong girl. So severe were the girls’ facial injuries that the hospital had taken pictures of them, and then sent colour faxes to police officials in Nickel Mines for identification — but not before officials tried to black out the injuries. Some parents were only shown photographs of children from the nose up, adding to the confusion.

The hospitals, too, are faced with another dilemma: the Amish refuse any type of health insurance. The welfare state for the Amish is the support network provided by the extended family. The average Amish has 80 first cousins. Who will pay the millions of dollars in medical expenses remains to be determined.

For the next few days, they will prepare to bury their dead. An “English” mortician will embalm the little girls, before returning them to their homes. The families, surrounded by hundreds of relatives, will grieve for two days. Then a two-hour funeral service will be held in a barn, with German prayers. Traditionally, the coffin lies open. These girls were shot at close range to the back of the head. Perhaps, on this occasion, the lids will be sealed tight.

Then small graves in the local Amish cemetery will be dug by hand and the girls will be buried.

Donald Kraybill, an expert on the Amish community, said: “In many ways, they are better prepared than most Americans to deal with such a tragedy.

“They have a huge family support network. They will not get angry. The pain will be deep, but they will not have to process it alone. They will cry, but it will be in private.

“And they will believe that it is God’s will and that it is nobody else’s business.”

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