While these things were occurring an officer, a big, flaxen-haired man, carrying a revolver in his hand, whose bloodshot eyes seemed bursting from their sockets, had caught sight of Weiss and Laurent, both in their civilian attire; he roared at them in French: 

“Who are you, you fellows? and what are you doing here?”

Then, glancing at their faces, black with powder-stains, he saw how matters stood, he heaped insult and abuse on them in guttural German, in a voice that shook with anger.  Already he had raised his revolver and was about to send a bullet into their heads, when the soldiers of his command rushed in, seized Laurent and Weiss, and hustled them out to the staircase.  The two men were borne along like straws upon a mill-race amidst that seething human torrent, under whose pressure they were hurled from out the door and sent staggering, stumbling across the street to the opposite wall amid a chorus of execration that drowned the sound of their officers’ voices.  Then, for a space of two or three minutes, while the big fair-haired officer was endeavoring to extricate them in order to proceed with their execution, an opportunity was afforded them to raise themselves erect and look about them.

Other houses had taken fire; Bazeilles was now a roaring, blazing furnace.  Flames had begun to appear at the tall windows of the church and were creeping upward toward the roof.  Some soldiers who were driving a venerable lady from her home had compelled her to furnish the matches with which to fire her own beds and curtains.  Lighted by blazing brands and fed by petroleum in floods, fires were rising and spreading in every quarter; it was no longer civilized warfare, but a conflict of savages, maddened by the long protracted strife, wreaking vengeance for their dead, their heaps of dead, upon whom they trod at every step they took.  Yelling, shouting bands traversed the streets amid the scurrying smoke and falling cinders, swelling the hideous uproar into which entered sounds of every kind:  shrieks, groans, the rattle of musketry, the crash of falling walls.  Men could scarce see one another; great livid clouds drifted athwart the sun and obscured his light, bearing with them an intolerable stench of soot and blood, heavy with the abominations of the slaughter.  In every quarter the work of death and destruction still went on:  the human brute unchained, the imbecile wrath, the mad fury, of man devouring his brother man.

And Weiss beheld his house burn before his eyes.  Some soldiers had applied the torch, others fed the flame by throwing upon it the fragments of the wrecked furniture.  The rez-de-chaussee was quickly in a blaze, the smoke poured in dense black volumes from the wounds in the front and roof.  But now the dyehouse adjoining was also on fire, and horrible to relate, the voice of little Charles, lying on his bed delirious with fever, could be heard through the crackling of the flames, beseeching his mother to bring him a draught of water, while the skirts of the wretched woman who, with her disfigured face, lay across the door-sill, were even then beginning to kindle.