FullReads

Bazeilles, through which they passed from end to end at a slow walk, afforded a spectacle of ruin and desolation, the worst that war can perpetrate when it sweeps with devastating force, like a cyclone, through a land. The dead had been removed; there was not a single corpse to be seen in the village streets, and the rain had washed away the blood; pools of reddish water were to be seen here and there in the roadway, with repulsive, frowzy-looking debris, matted masses that one could not help associating in his mind with human hair. But what shocked and saddened one more than all the rest was the ruin that was visible everywhere; that charming village, only three days before so bright and smiling, with its pretty houses standing in their well-kept gardens, now razed, demolished, annihilated, nothing left of all its beauties save a few smoke-stained walls. The church was burning still, a huge pyre of smoldering beams and girders, whence streamed continually upward a column of dense black smoke that, spreading in the heavens, overshadowed the city like a gigantic funeral pall. Entire streets had been swept away, not a house left on either side, nor any trace that houses had ever been there, save the calcined stone-work lying in the gutter in a pasty mess of soot and ashes, the whole lost in the viscid, ink-black mud of the thoroughfare. Where streets intersected the corner houses were razed down to their foundations, as if they had been carried away bodily by the fiery blast that blew there. Others had suffered less; one in particular, owing to some chance, had escaped almost without injury, while its neighbors on either hand, literally torn to pieces by the iron hail, were like gaunt skeletons. An unbearable stench was everywhere, noticeable, the nauseating odor that follows a great fire, aggravated by the penetrating smell of petroleum, that had been used without stint upon floors and walls. Then, too, there was the pitiful, mute spectacle of the household goods that the people had endeavored to save, the poor furniture that had been thrown from windows and smashed upon the sidewalk, crazy tables with broken legs, presses with cloven sides and split doors, linen, also, torn and soiled, that was trodden under foot; all the sorry crumbs, the unconsidered trifles of the pillage, of which the destruction was being completed by the dissolving rain. Through the breach in a shattered house-front a clock was visible, securely fastened high up on the wall above the mantel-shelf, that had miraculously escaped intact.

“The beasts! the pigs!” growled Prosper, whose blood, though he was no longer a soldier, ran hot at the sight of such atrocities.

He doubled his fists, and Silvine, who was white as a ghost, had to exert the influence of her glance to calm him every time they encountered a sentry on their way. The Bavarians had posted sentinels near all the houses that were still burning, and it seemed as if those men, with loaded muskets and fixed bayonets, were guarding the fires in order that the flames might finish their work. They drove away the mere sightseers who strolled about in the vicinity, and the persons who had an interest there as well, employing first a menacing gesture, and in case that was not sufficient, uttering a single brief, guttural word of command. A young woman, her hair streaming about her shoulders, her gown plastered with mud, persisted in hanging about the smoking ruins of a little house, of which she desired to search the hot ashes, notwithstanding the prohibition of the sentry. The report ran that the woman’s little baby had been burned with the house. And all at once, as the Bavarian was roughly thrusting her aside with his heavy hand, she turned on him, vomiting in his face all her despair and rage, lashing him with taunts and insults that were redolent of the gutter, with obscene words which likely afforded her some consolation in her grief and distress. He could not have understood her, for he drew back a pace or two, eying her with apprehension. Three comrades came running up and relieved him of the fury, whom they led away screaming at the top of her voice. Before the ruins of another house a man and two little girls, all three so weary and miserable that they could not stand, lay on the bare ground, sobbing as if their hearts would break; they had seen their little all go up in smoke and flame, and had no place to go, no place to lay their head. But just then a patrol went by, dispersing the knots of idlers, and the street again assumed its deserted aspect, peopled only by the stern, sullen sentries, vigilant to see that their iniquitous instructions were enforced.