n attest that wounded French soldiers crawled to
the already putrid carcasses of horses, with some blunt knife or other
contrived with their feeble hands to cut the flesh from the haunches,
and greedily regaled themselves with the carrion. They were glad to
appease their hunger with what the raven and the kite never feed on but
in cases of necessity. They even tore the flesh from human limbs, and
broiled it to satisfy the cravings of appetite; nay, what is almost
incredible, the very dunghills were searched for undigested fragments to
devour. You know me, and must certainly believe that I would not relate
as facts things which would be liable to be contradicted by the whole
city. Thus the hospitals became a hot-bed of pestilence, from which the
senses of hearing, smell, and sight, turned with disgust, and one of the
most fatal of those vampyres which had so profusely drained our vitals,
and now dispensed destruction to those who had fed them and to the sick
themselves.

The great church-yard exhibited a spectacle of peculiar horror. The
peaceful dead and their monuments had been spared no more than any other
corner of the city. Here also the king of terrors had reaped a rich
harvest. The slight walls had been converted into one great fort, and
loop-holes formed in them. Troops had long before bivouacked in this
spot, and the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian prisoners, were here
confined, frequently for several successive days, in the most
tempestuous weather and violent rain, without food, straw, or shelter.
These poor fellows had nevertheless spared the many handsome monuments
of the deceased, and only sought a refuge from the wet, or a lodging for
the night, in such vaults as they found open. This spacious ground,
which rather resembled a superbly embellished garden than a
burial-place, now fell under the all-desolating hands of the French. It
soon bore not the smallest resemblance to itself; what Art had, in the
space of a century, employed a thousand hands to produce, was in a short
time, and by very few, defaced and destroyed. The strongest iron doors
to the vaults were broken open, the walls stripped of their decorations
and emblems of mourning, the last tributes of grief and affection
annihilated, and every atom of wood thrown into the watch-fire; so that
the living could no longer know where to look for the remains of the
deceased objects of their love. The elegant rails, with which the
generality of the graves w