istance he could, had determined on
taking the route that lay through the city of Sedan, but before they
reached Pont-Maugis a Prussian outpost halted the cart and held it for
over an hour, and finally, after their pass had been referred, one after
another, to four or five officials, they were told they might resume
their journey, but only on condition of taking the longer, roundabout
route by way of Bazeilles, to do which they would have to turn into
a cross-road on their left. No reason was assigned; their object was
probably to avoid adding to the crowd that encumbered the streets of
the city. When Silvine crossed the Meuse by the railroad bridge, that
ill-starred bridge that the French had failed to destroy and which,
moreover, had been the cause of such slaughter among the Bavarians,
she beheld the corpse of an artilleryman floating lazily down with the
sluggish current. It caught among some rushes near the bank, hung there
a moment, then swung clear and started afresh on its downward way.

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