o the extent of
occasionally shooting their own sentries and putting themselves in
battle array if a rabbit stirred in the brushwood, had now retired to
their domestic hearths; their arms, their uniforms, all the murderous
apparatus with which they had been wont to strike terror to the hearts
of all beholders for three leagues round, had vanished.

Finally, the last of the French soldiery crossed the Seine on their way
to Pont-Audemer by Saint Sever and Bourg-Achard; and then, last of all,
came their despairing general tramping on foot between two orderlies,
powerless to attempt any action with these disjointed fragments of his
forces, himself utterly dazed and bewildered by the downfall of a people
accustomed to victory and now so disastrously beaten in spite of its
traditional bravery.

After that a profound calm, the silence of terrified suspense, fell over
the city. Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial
life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest
their meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come under the
category of arms.

Life seemed to have come to a standstill, the shops were closed, the
streets silent. From time to time an inhabitant, intimidated by their
silence, would flit rapidly along the pavement, keeping close to the
walls.

In this anguish of suspense, men longed for the coming of the enemy.

In the latter part of the day following the departure of the French
troops, some Uhlans, appearing from goodness knows where, traversed the
city hastily. A little later, a black mass descended from the direction
of Sainte-Catherine, while two more invading torrents poured in from the
roads from Darnetal and Bois-guillaume. The advance guards of the three
corps converged at the same moment into the square of the Hotel de
Ville, while battalion after battalion of the German army wound in
through the adjacent streets, making the pavement ring under their heavy
rhythmic tramp.

Orders shouted in strange and guttural tones were echoed back by the
apparently dead and deserted houses, while from behind the closed
shutters eyes peered furtively at the conquerors, masters by right of
might, of the city and the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants. The
people in their darkened dwellings fell a prey to the helpless
bewilderment which comes over men before the floods, the devastating
upheavals of the earth, against which all wisdom and all force are
unavailing. Th