s was the forest, in front of us also
the forest, but here, how the sun blazed down on the roofs and little
blown patches of garden, how it glared in through the broken windows,
and penetrated into the darkest corners of the desolate rooms!

Poor N----! In the second month of the war it had been shelled and
many of the houses destroyed. The buildings that remained seemed to
have given up the struggle and abandoned themselves to inevitable
degradation. Moreover, down the principal street, at every other door
there hung the sinister black flag, a piece of dirty black cloth
fastened to a stick, and upon the filthy wall was scrawled in Russian
"cholera." Dead, indeed, under the appalling heat of the morning the
whole place lay. No one was to be seen until we neared the ruins of
what had once been a little town-hall or meeting-place, a procession
turned the corner--a procession of a peasant with a tall lighted
candle, another peasant with a tattered banner, a priest in soiled
silk, a coffin of white wood on a haycart, and four or five
white-faced and apathetic women. A doleful singing came from the
miserable party. They did not look at us as we passed....

A rumble of cannon, once and again, sounded like the lazy snore of
some sleeping beast.

Near the town-hall we found a company of fantastic creatures awaiting
us. They were pressed together in a dense crowd as though they were
afraid of some one attacking them. There were many old men, like the
clowns in Shakespeare, dirty beyond belief in tattered garments,
wide-brimmed hats, broad skirts and baggy trousers; old men with long
tangled hair, bare bony breasts and slobbering chins. Many of the
women seemed strong and young; their faces were on the whole
cheerful--a brazen indifference to anything and everything was their
attitude. There were many children. Two gendarmes guarded them with
rough friendly discipline. I thought that I had seen nothing more
terrible at the war than the eager pitiful docility with which they
moved to and fro in obedience to the gendarmes' orders. A dreadful,
broken, creeping submission....

But it was their fantasy, their coloured incredible unreality that
overwhelmed me. The building, black and twisted against the hard blue
sky, raised its head behind us like a malicious monster. Before us
this crowd, all tattered faded pieces of scarlet and yellow and blue,
men with huge noses, sunken eyes, sharp chins, long skinny hands,
women with hard, b