as weapons.

Life seemed to have stopped short; the shops were shut, the streets
deserted. Now and then an inhabitant, awed by the silence, glided swiftly
by in the shadow of the walls. The anguish of suspense made men even
desire the arrival of the enemy.

In the afternoon of the day following the departure of the French troops,
a number of uhlans, coming no one knew whence, passed rapidly through the
town. A little later on, a black mass descended St. Catherine's Hill,
while two other invading bodies appeared respectively on the Darnetal and
the Boisguillaume roads. The advance guards of the three corps arrived at
precisely the same moment at the Square of the Hotel de Ville, and the
German army poured through all the adjacent streets, its battalions
making the pavement ring with their firm, measured tread.

Orders shouted in an unknown, guttural tongue rose to the windows of the
seemingly dead, deserted houses; while behind the fast-closed shutters
eager eyes peered forth at the victors-masters now of the city, its
fortunes, and its lives, by "right of war." The inhabitants, in their
darkened rooms, were possessed by that terror which follows in the wake
of cataclysms, of deadly upheavals of the earth, against which all human
skill and strength are vain. For the same thing happens whenever the
established order of things is upset, when security no longer exists,
when all those rights usually protected by the law of man or of Nature
are at the mercy of unreasoning, savage force. The earthquake crushing a
whole nation under falling roofs; the flood let loose, and engulfing in
its swirling depths the corpses of drowned peasants, along with dead oxen
and beams torn from shattered houses; or the army, covered with glory,
murdering those who defend themselves, making prisoners of the rest,
pillaging in the name of the Sword, and giving thanks to God to the
thunder of cannon--all these are appalling scourges, which destroy
all belief in eternal justice, all that confidence we have been taught to
feel in the protection of Heaven and the reason of man.

Small detachments of soldiers knocked at each door, and then disappeared
within the houses; for the vanquished saw they would have to be civil to
their conquerors.

At the end of a short time, once the first terror had subsided, calm was
again restored. In many houses the Prussian officer ate at the same table
with the family. He was often well-bred, and, out of politeness