by the fleeing foe, had for the most part united, and had found a sure mark for every shot in the closely crowded masses of the enemy.  But the most dreadful sight of all was that which presented itself in the beautiful Richter’s garden, once the ornament of the city, on that side where it joins the Elster.  There the cavalry must have been engaged; at least I there saw a great number of French cuirasses lying about.  All along the bank, heads, arms, and feet, appeared above the water.  Numbers, in attempting to ford the treacherous river, had here perished.  People were just then engaged in collecting the arms that had been thrown away by the fugitives, and they had already formed a pile of them far exceeding the height of a man.

The smoking ruins of whole villages and towns, or extensive tracts laid waste by inundations, exhibit a melancholy spectacle; but a field of battle is assuredly the most shocking sight that eye can ever behold.  Here all kinds of horrors are united; here Death reaps his richest harvest, and revels amid a thousand different forms of human suffering.  The whole area has of itself a peculiar and repulsive physiognomy, resulting from such a variety of heterogeneous objects as are no where else found together.  The relics of torches, the littered and trampled straw, the bones and flesh of slaughtered animals, fragments of plates, a thousand articles of leather, tattered cartouch-boxes, old rags, clothes thrown away, all kinds of harness, broken muskets, shattered waggons and carts, weapons of all sorts, thousands of dead and dying, horribly mangled bodies of men and horses,—­and all these intermingled!—­I shudder whenever I recall to memory this scene, which, for the world, I would not again behold.  Such, however, was the spectacle that presented itself in all directions; so that a person, who had before seen the beautiful environs of Leipzig, would not have known them again in their present state.  Barriers, gardens, parks, hedges, and walks, were alike destroyed and swept away.  These devastations were not the consequence of this day’s engagement, but of the previous bivouacking of the French, who are now so habituated to conduct themselves in such a manner that their bivouacs never fail to exhibit the most deplorable attestations of their presence, as to admit no hopes of a change.  The appearance of Richter’s garden was a fair specimen of the aspect of all the others.  Among these the beautiful one of Loehr was particularly remarkable.  Here French artillery had been stationed towards Goehlis; and here both horses and men had suffered most severely.  The magnificent buildings, in the Grecian style, seemed mournfully to overlook their late agreeable, now devastated, groves, enlivened in spring by the warbling of hundreds of nightingales, but where now nothing was to be heard, save the loud groans of the dying.  The dark alleys, summer-houses, and arbours, so often resorted to for recreation, social pleasures, or silent meditation,