silence, only broken from time to time by
the flapping of the condor's wings. Nobody. . . . His gaze could not
distinguish a single movable point--everything fixed, motionless,
crystallized, as though contracted with fear before the peals of thunder
which were still rumbling around the horizon.

He went on toward the village--a mass of black walls with a few houses
still intact, and a roofless bell tower with its cross twisted by fire.
Nobody in the streets sown with bottles, charred chunks of wood, and
soot-covered rubbish. The dead bodies had disappeared, but a nauseating
smell of decomposing and burned flesh assailed his nostrils. He saw
a mound of earth where the shooting had taken place, and from it were
protruding two feet and a hand. At his approach several black forms flew
up into the air from a trench so shallow that the bodies within were
exposed to view. A whirring of stiff wings beat the air above him,
flying off with the croakings of wrath. He explored every nook and
corner, even approaching the place where the troopers had erected their
barricade. The carts were still by the roadside.

He then retraced his steps, calling out before the least injured
houses, and putting his head through the doors and windows that were
unobstructed or but half consumed. Was nobody left in Villeblanche? He
descried among the ruins something advancing on all fours, a species of
reptile that stopped its crawling with movements of hesitation and fear,
ready to retreat or slip into its hole under the ruins. Suddenly the
creature stopped and stood up. It was a man, an old man. Other human
larvae were coming forth conjured by his shouts--poor beings who hours
ago had given up the standing position which would have attracted
the bullets of the enemy, and had been enviously imitating the lower
organisms, squirming through the dirt as fast as they could scurry into
the bosom of the earth. They were mostly women and children, all filthy
and black, with snarled hair, the fierceness of animal appetite in their
eyes--the faintness of the weak animal in their hanging jaws. They
were all living hidden in the ruins of their homes. Fear had made them
temporarily forget their hunger, but finding that the enemy had gone,
they were suddenly assailed by all necessitous demands, intensified by
hours of anguish.

Desnoyers felt as though he were surrounded by a tribe of brutalized
and famished Indians like those he had often seen in his adventuro