Don Marcelo’s compassion for that forlorn cluster of massacred humanity was intensified on beholding the grotesque forms which many assumed in the moment of death.  Some collapsed like half-emptied sacks; others rebounded from the ground like balls; some leaped like gymnasts, with upraised arms, falling on their backs, or face downward, like a swimmer.  In that human heap, he saw limbs writhing in the agony of death.  Some soldiers advanced like hunters bagging their prey.  From the palpitating mass fluttered locks of white hair, and a feeble hand, trying to repeat the sacred sign.  A few more shots and blows on the livid, mangled mass . . . and the last tremors of life were extinguished forever.

The officer had lit a cigar.

“Whenever you wish,” he said to Desnoyers with ironical courtesy.

They re-entered the automobile in order to return to the castle by the way of Villeblanche.  The increasing number of fires and the dead bodies in the streets no longer impressed the old man.  He had seen so much!  What could now affect his sensibilities? . . .  He was longing to get out of the village as soon as possible to try to find the peace of the country.  But the country had disappeared under the invasion—­soldier’s, horses, cannons everywhere.  Wherever they stopped to rest, they were destroying all that they came in contact with.  The marching battalions, noisy and automatic as a machine were preceded by the fifes and drums, and every now and then, in order to cheer their drooping spirits, were breaking into their joyous cry, “Nach Paris!”

The castle, too, had been disfigured by the invasion.  The number of guards had greatly increased during the owner’s absence.  He saw an entire regiment of infantry encamped in the park.  Thousands of men were moving about under the trees, preparing the dinner in the movable kitchens.  The flower borders of the gardens, the exotic plants, the carefully swept and gravelled avenues were all broken and spoiled by this avalanche of men, beasts and vehicles.

A chief wearing on his sleeve the band of the military administration was giving orders as though he were the proprietor.  He did not even condescend to look at this civilian walking beside the lieutenant with the downcast look of a prisoner.  The stables were vacant.  Desnoyers saw his last animals being driven off with sticks by the helmeted shepherds.  The costly progenitors of his herds were all beheaded in the park like mere slaughter-house animals.  In the chicken houses and dovecotes, there was not a single bird left.  The stables were filled with thin horses who were gorging themselves before overflowing mangers.  The feed from the barns was being lavishly distributed through the avenue, much of it lost before it could be used.  The cavalry horses of various divisions were turned loose in the meadows, destroying with their hoofs the canals, the edges of the slopes, the level of the ground, all the work of many months.  The dry wood was uselessly burning in the park.  Through carelessness or mischief, someone had set the wood piles on fire.  The trees, with the bark dried by the summer heat, were crackling on being licked by the flame.