s shoulders than this morning of the second of
December, the last day of the battle of Champigny, while he was sadly
promenading before the stacked guns of his battalion.

The dark clouds, heavy with snow, were hurrying by, the tormenting
rumble of the cannons, the muddy country, the crumbling buildings, and
these vanquished soldiers shivering under their rags, all threw the poet
into the most gloomy of reveries. Then humanity so many ages, centuries,
perhaps, old, had only reached this point: Hatred, absurd war,
fratricidal murder! Progress? Civilization? Mere words! No rest, no
peaceful repose, either in fraternity or love! The primitive brute
always reappears, the right of the stronger to hold in its clutches
the pale cadaver of justice! What is the use of so many religions,
philosophies, all the noble dreams, all the grand impulses of the
thought toward the ideal and good? This horrible doctrine of the
pessimists was true then! We are, then, like animals, eternally
condemned to kill each other in order to live? If that is so, one might
as well renounce life, and give up the ghost!

Meanwhile the cannonading now redoubled, and with its tragic grumbling
was mingled the dry crackling sound of the musketry; beyond a wooded
hillock, which restricted the view toward the southeast, a very thick
white smoke spread over the horizon, mounting up into the gray sky. The
fight had just been resumed there, and it was getting hot, for soon the
ambulances and army-wagons drawn by artillery men began to pass. They
were full of the wounded, whose plaintive moans were heard as they
passed. They had crowded the least seriously wounded ones into the
omnibus, which went at a foot pace, but the road had been broken up by
the bad weather, and it was pitiful to behold these heads shaken as
they passed over each rut. The sight of the dying extended upon bloody
mattresses was still more lugubrious to see. The frightful procession
of the slaughtered went slowly toward the city to the hospitals, but
the carriages sometimes stopped, only a hundred steps from the position
occupied by the National Guards, before a house where a provisionary
hospital had been established, and left their least transportable ones
there. The morbid but powerful attraction that horrible sights exert
over a man urged Amedee Violette to this spot. This house had been
spared from bombardment and protected from pillage and fire by the
Geneva flag; it was a small cottage w