force besieging Paris, the young lieutenant
made his way onwards in company with a reserve column of Landwehr
proceeding to fill up casualties in Manteuffel's ranks--the journey not
being rendered any the more agreeable by the frequent attacks suffered
from franc-tireurs when passing through the many woods and forests
encountered on the route, in addition to meeting straggling bands of the
enemy, who opposed the progress of the column the more vigorously as it
abandoned the main roads leading from the frontier and struck across
country.

It was not by any means a pleasure trip; but, putting all perils aside,
regarding them merely as the vicissitudes of a soldier's lot, what
impressed Fritz more than anything else was the ruin and devastation
which, following thus in the rear of a triumphant army, he everywhere
noticed.

The towns he entered on his way had most of their shops shut, and the
windows of the private houses were closed, as if in sympathy with a
national funeral, those which had been bombarded--and these were many--
having, besides, their streets blocked up with fallen masonry and
scattered beams of timber, their church steeples prostrate, and the
walls of buildings perforated with round shot and bursting shells that
had likewise burnt and demolished the roofs; while, in the more open
country, the farms and villages had been swept away as if with a
whirlwind of fire, only bare gables and blackened rafters staring up
into the clouds, like the skeletons of what were once happy homes. The
vineyards and fields and gardens around were destroyed and running to
waste in the most pitiful way, for every one connected with them, who
had formerly cherished and tended them with such care and attention, had
either been killed or else sought safety in flight to the cities, where
their refuge was equally precarious. Along the highway, the trees,
whose branches once gave such grateful shade to wayfarers, were now cut
down, only rows of hideous, half-consumed stumps remaining in their
stead; while here and there, as the scene of some great battle was
passed, great mounds like oblong bases of flattened pyramids rose above
the surface of the devastated plain--mounds under whose frozen surface
lay the mouldering bodies of thousands of brave men who had fallen on
the bloody field, their last resting-place unmarked by sepulchral cross
or monumental marble. Everywhere there was terrible evidence of the
effects of war and the pr