.

When we had left the Mauer-and Friedrichstrasse behind, our hearts
began to beat faster, and what we saw on the rest of the way through the
longest street of Berlin as far as the Linden was of such a nature that
the mere thought of it awakens in me to this day an ardent hope that I
may never witness such sights again.

Rage, hate, and destruction had celebrated the maddest orgies on our
path, and Death, with passionate vehemence, had swung his sharpest
scythe. Wild savagery and merciless destruction had blended with the
shrewdest deliberation and skillful knowledge in constructing the
bars which the German, avoiding his own good familiar word, called
barricades. An elderly gentleman who was explaining their construction,
pointed out to us the ingenuity with which some of the barricades had
been strengthened for defence on the one side, and left comparatively
weak on the other. Every trench dug where the paving was torn up had its
object, and each heap of stones its particular design.

But the ordinary spectator needed a guide to recognize this. At the
first sight, his attention was claimed by the confused medley and the
many heart-rending signs of the horrors practised by man on man.

Here was a pool of blood, there a bearded corpse; here a blood-stained
weapon, there another blackened with powder. Like a caldron where a
witch mixes all manner of strange things for a philter, each barricade
consisted of every sort of rubbish, together with objects originally
useful. All kinds of overturned vehicles, from an omnibus to a
perambulator, from a carriage to a hand-cart, were everywhere to be
found. Wardrobes, commodes, chairs, boards, laths, bookshelves, bath
tubs and washtubs, iron and wooden pipes, were piled together, and
the interstices filled with sacks of straw and rags, mattresses, and
carriage cushions. Whence came the planks yonder, if they were not
stripped from the floor of some room? Children and promenaders had sat
only yesterday on those benches and, the night before that, oil lamps
or gas flames had burned on those lamp-posts. The sign-boards on top had
invited customers into shop or inn, and the roll of carpet beneath was
perhaps to have covered some floor to-morrow. Oleander shrubs, which I
was to see later in rocky vales of Greece or Algeria, had possibly
been put out here only the day before into the spring sunshine. The
warehouses of the capital no doubt contained everything that could be
needed, n