, as if they were in cages in
the open air; and in one we saw a mirror and an evergreen branch,
showing where dwelt a young girl in time of peace.

Ah! who could foresee that their happiness would so soon be destroyed,
not by the fury of the winds or the wrath of heaven, but by the rage of
man!

Even the cattle and pigeons seemed seeking their lost homes among the
ruins; the oxen and the goats, scattered through the streets, lowed and
bleated plaintively. Fowls were roosting upon the trees, and
everywhere, everywhere we saw the traces of cannon-balls.

At the last house an old man with flowing white hair, sat at the
threshold of what had been his cottage, with a child upon his knees,
glaring on us as we passed. "Did he see us?" I do not know. His
furrowed brow and stony eyes spoke of despair. How many years of
labor, of patient economy, of suffering, had he passed to make sure a
quiet old age! Now all was crushed, ruined; the child and he had no
longer a roof to cover their heads.

And those great trenches--fully a mile of them--at which the country
people were working in such haste, to keep the plague from completing
the work war began! I saw them, too, from the top of the hill of Kaya,
and turned away my eyes, horror-stricken. Russians, French, Prussians,
were there heaped pell-mell, as if God had made them to love each other
before the invention of arms and uniforms, which divide them for the
profit of those who rule them. There they lay, side by side; and the
part of them which could not die knew no more of war, but cursed the
crimes that had for centuries kept them apart.

But what was sadder yet, was the long line of ambulances--bearing the
agonized wounded--those of whom they speak so much in the bulletins to
make the loss seem less, and who die by thousands in the hospitals, far
from all they love; while at their homes cannon are firing, and
church-bells are ringing with joyous chimes--rejoicing that thousands
of men are slain!

At length we reach Lutzen, but it was so full of wounded that we were
obliged to continue on to Leipzig. We saw in the streets only
half-dead wretches, stretched on straw along the walls of the houses.
It was more than an hour before we reached a church, where fifteen or
twenty of us who could no longer proceed were left.

Our ambulance conductor and his men, after refreshing themselves at a
tavern at the street corner, remounted, and we continued our journey to
Leipzi