money they demanded was refused them, they
stripped the men of their clothes, lashed them until the blood flowed,
or cruelly wounded or maimed them with sabre-cuts; and when the women
fled from them, they followed them up, and forced them by brutal
ill-treatment to yield themselves. No house in Charlottenburg escaped
being plundered; and so cruel were the tortures which the inhabitants
suffered, that four of the unfortunate men died a miserable death at
the hands of the Saxon soldiers.

They were Germans who waged against their brother Germans, against
their own countrymen, a brutality and barbarous love of destruction
almost unequalled in the annals of modern history. Consequently
it seemed but natural that the Russians should be excited by such
examples of barbarity, so unstintedly set them by the Austrians and
Saxons. No wonder that they, too, at last began to rob and plunder, to
break into houses at night, and carry off women and maidens by force,
in order to have them released next day by heavy ransom; and that even
the severe punishments, inflicted on those whom the people had the
courage to complain of to the generals lost their terror, and were
no restraint on these sons of the steppes and ice-fields, led away as
they were by the other ruffians.

Two hundred and eighty-two houses were destroyed and thoroughly
plundered in Berlin by the Austrians; the Saxons had devastated the
royal palace in Charlottenburg, and the whole town. Should not the
Russians also leave a memorial of their vandalism? They did so in
Schoenhausen, the pleasure-palace of the consort of Frederick the
Great, who had left it a few days previous, by express command of the
king, to take up her residence in Magdeburg. Eight Russian hussars
forced themselves into the palace, and, with terrible threats,
demanded the king's plate. Only the castellan and his wife, and a few
of the royal servants, had been left behind to protect the place, and
the only answer they could make to the furious soldiers was, that the
booty which they were in search of had been carried with the royal
party to Magdeburg. This information excited their fury to the highest
pitch. Like the Saxon dragoons of Charlottenburg, they devastated the
Schoenhausen palace, stripped the castellan and his wife, and, with
shouts of wild laughter, whipped them and pinched their flesh with
red-hot tongs. And, as if the sight of these bloody and torn human
bodies had only increased their de