Weissenfels [Bebra is well ahead from Freiburg and the burnt Bridge,
and a good twenty-five miles west of Weissenfels], writes To the King of
Poland's Majesty, 9th NOVEMBER, 1757:--

"May it please your Royal Majesty and Electoral Translucency, out of
your highest grace, to take knowledge, from the accompanying Registers
SUB SIGNO MARTIS [sign unknown to readers here], of the things which, in
the name of this Township of Bebra, the Burgermeister Johann Adam, with
the Raths and others concerned, have laid before the Excise-Inspection
here. As follows:--

"It will be already well known to the Excise-Inspection that on the
7th of November (A. C.) of the current year [day before yesterday, in
fact!], the French Army so handled this place as to have not only taken
from the inhabitants, by open force, all bread and articles of food, but
likewise all clothes, beds, linens (WASCHE), and other portable goods;
that it has broken, split to pieces, and emptied out, all chests,
boxes, presses, drawers; has shot dead, in the backyards and on the
thatch-roofs, all manner of feathered-stock, as hens, geese, pigeons;
also carried forth with it all swine, cow, sheep and horse cattle; laid
violent hands on the inhabitants, clapped guns, swords, pistols to their
breast, and threatened to kill them unless they showed and brought out
whatever goods they had; or else has hunted them wholly out of their
houses, shooting at them, cutting, sticking and at last driving them
away, thereby to have the freer room to rob and plunder: flung out hay
and other harvest-stock from the barns into the mud and dung, and had
it trampled to ruin under the horses, feet; nay, in fact, has dealt with
this place in so unpermitted a way as even to the most hard-hearted man
must seem compassionable."--Poor fellows: CETERA DESUNT; but that is
enough! What can a Polish Majesty and Electoral Translucency do? Here
too is a sorrowful howling to the Moon. [_Helden-Geschichte,_ iv. 692.]

... "For a hundred miles round," writes St. Germain, "the Country is
plundered and harried as if fire from Heaven had fallen on it; scarcely
have our plunderers and marauders left the houses standing.... I lead a
band of robbers, of assassins, fit for breaking on the wheel; they would
turn tail at the first gunshot, and are always ready to mutiny. If the
Government (LA COUR," with its Pompadour presiding, very unlikely for
such an enterprise!) "cannot lay the knife to the root of all t