esh across the snowlight. Flesh! The red sky lay off in the
direction of Kishinef. What was it? The straw roof of a burning barn?
The precious flesh of an ox? What? Reb Baruch, with a married daughter
and eleven children in Kishinef, sat up all night and prayed and swayed
and trembled.

Packed in airtight against the bite of the steely out-of-doors, most of
the village of Vodna--except the children and the half-witted Shimsha,
the _ganef_--huddled under its none-too-plentiful coverings that night
and prayed and trembled.

At five o'clock that red dawn, almost as if a bayonet had crashed into
her dream, Sara, her face smeared with pallor, awoke to the smell of
her own hair singeing. A bayonet _had_ crashed, but through the door,
terribly!

The rest is an anguished war frieze of fleeing figures; of running
hither and thither in the wildness of fear; of mothers running with
babes at breasts; of men, their twisted faces steaming sweat, locked in
the Laocooen embrace of death. Banners of flame. The exultant belch of
iridescent smoke. Cries the shape of steel rapiers. A mouth torn back to
an ear. Prayers being moaned. The sticky stench of coagulating blood.
Pillage. Outrage. Old men dragging household chattels. Figures crumpling
up in the outlandish attitudes of death. The enormous braying of
frightened cattle. A spurred heel over a face in that horrible moment
when nothing can stay its descent. The shriek of a round-bosomed girl
to the smear of wet lips across hers. The superb daring of her lover to
kill her. A babe in arms. Two. The black billowing of fireless smoke.

A child in the horse trough, knocked there from its mother's arms by the
butt end of a bayonet, its red curls quite sticky in a circle of its
little blood. A half-crazed mother with a singed eyebrow, blatting over
it and groveling on her breasts toward the stiffening figure for the
warmth they could not give; the father, a black-haired child in his
arms, tearing her by force out of the zone of buckshot, plunging back
into it himself to cover up decently, with his coat, what the horse
trough held.

Dawn. A huddle of fugitives. Footsteps of blood across the wide open
places of snow. A mother, whose eyes are terrible with what she has left
in the horse trough, fighting to turn back. A husband who literally
carries her, screaming, farther and farther across the cruel open
places. A town. A ship. The crucified eyes of the mother always looking
back. Back.