ch many were wounded, they seized the little boys and
girls, as well as the hind, who had bitten a soldier's thumb. Then
they left the house, locking the door behind them to prevent the
inmates from going with them.

Those of the villagers who had no children slowly left their homes and
followed them from afar. When the soldiers carrying their victims came
to the old man, they threw them on the grass and deliberately killed
them with their spears and their swords, while all along the front of
the blue house the men and women leant out of the windows of the upper
floor and the loft, cursing and rocking wildly in the sunshine at the
sight of the red, pink and white frocks of their little ones lying
motionless on the grass among the trees. Then the soldiers hanged the
hind from the sign of the Half Moon on the other side of the street;
and there was a long silence in the village.

The massacre now began to spread. Mothers ran out of the houses and
tried to escape to the open country through the gardens and
kitchen-plots; but the horsemen scoured after them and drove them back
into the street. Peasants, holding their caps in their clasped hands,
followed upon their knees the men who were dragging away their
children, among the dogs which barked deliriously amid the din. The
priest, with his arms raised aloft, ran along the houses and under the
trees, praying desperately, like a martyr; and soldiers, shivering
with cold, blew on their fingers as they moved about the road, or,
with their hands in the pockets of their trunks and their swords
tucked under their arms, waited beneath the windows of the houses that
were being scaled.

On seeing the grief-stricken terror of the peasants, they entered the
farm-houses in little bands; and in like fashion they acted throughout
the length of the street.

A woman who sold vegetables in the old red-brick cottage near the
church seized a chair and ran after two men who were carrying off her
children in a wheel-barrow. When she saw them die, a sickness overcame
her; and she suffered the folk to press her into the chair, against a
tree by the road-side.

Other soldiers climbed up the lime-trees in front of a house painted
lilac and removed the tiles in order to enter the house. When they
came out again upon the roof, the father and mother, with outstretched
arms, also appeared in the opening; and they pushed them down
repeatedly, cutting them over the head with their swords, before th