a shell, with a frightful crash, came tearing through the roof of a neighboring house.  Two others followed in quick succession; it was a German battery shelling the rear-guard of the 7th corps.  Some of the wounded from Beaumont had already been brought in to the mairie, where it was feared that the enemy’s projectiles would finish them as they lay on their mattresses waiting for the doctor to come and operate on them.  The men were crazed with fear, and would have risen and gone down into the cellars, notwithstanding their mangled limbs, which extorted from them shrieks of agony.

“And then,” continued Silvine, “I don’t know how it happened, but all at once the uproar was succeeded by a deathlike stillness.  I had gone upstairs and was looking from a window that commanded a view of the street and fields.  There was not a soul in sight, not a ‘red-leg’ to be seen anywhere, when I heard the tramp, tramp of heavy footsteps, and then a voice shouted something that I could not understand and all the muskets came to the ground together with a great crash.  And I looked down into the street below, and there was a crowd of small, dirty-looking men in black, with ugly, big faces and wearing helmets like those our firemen wear.  Someone told me they were Bavarians.  Then I raised my eyes again and saw, oh! thousands and thousands of them, streaming in by the roads, across the fields, through the woods, in serried, never-ending columns.  In the twinkling of an eye the ground was black with them, a black swarm, a swarm of black locusts, coming thicker and thicker, so that, in no time at all, the earth was hid from sight.”

She shivered and repeated her former gesture, veiling her vision from some atrocious spectacle.

“And the things that occurred afterward would exceed belief.  It seems those men had been marching three days, and on top of that had fought at Beaumont like tigers; hence they were perishing with hunger, their eyes were starting from their sockets, they were beside themselves.  The officers made no effort to restrain them; they broke into shops and private houses, smashing doors and windows, demolishing furniture, searching for something to eat and drink, no matter what, bolting whatever they could lay their hands on.  I saw one in the shop of Monsieur Simonin, the grocer, ladling molasses from a cask with his helmet.  Others were chewing strips of raw bacon, others again had filled their mouths with flour.  They were told that our troops had been passing through the town for the last two days and there was nothing left, but here and there they found some trifling store that had been hid away, not sufficient to feed so many hungry mouths, and that made them think the folks were lying to them, and they went on to smash things more furiously than ever.  In less than an hour, there was not a butcher’s, grocer’s, or baker’s shop in the city left ungutted; even the private houses were entered, their cellars emptied,