One family, which had locked itself into the cellar of a rambling cottage, cried through the grating, where the father stood madly brandishing a pitchfork.  An old, bald-headed man was sobbing all alone on a dung-heap; a woman in yellow had fainted in the market-place and her husband was holding her under her arms and moaning in the shadow of a pear-tree; another, in red, was kissing her little girl, who had lost her hands, and lifting first one arm and then the other to see if she would not move.  Yet another ran into the country and the soldiers pursued her through the hayricks that bounded the snow-clad fields.

Beneath the inn of the Four Sons of Aymon there was a tumult as of a siege.  The inhabitants had barred the door; and the soldiers went round and round the house without being able to make their way in.  They were trying to clamber up to the sign by the fruit-trees against the front wall, when they caught sight of a ladder behind the garden-door.  They set it against the wall and mounted one after the other.  Thereupon the landlord and all his household hurled tables, chairs, dishes and cradles at them from the windows.  The ladder upset and the soldiers fell down.

In a wooden hut, at the end of the village, another band found a peasant-woman bathing her children in a tub by the fire.  Being old and almost deaf, she did not hear them come in.  Two soldiers took the tub and carried it off; and the dazed woman went after them, with the children’s clothes, wanting to dress them.  But, when she came to the door and suddenly saw the splashes of blood in the village, the swords in the orchard, the cradles over-turned in the street, women on their knees and women waving their arms around the dead, she began to cry out with all her strength and to strike the soldiers, who put down the tub to defend themselves.  The priest also came hastening up and, folding his hands across his vestment, entreated the Spaniards before the naked children, who were whimpering in the water.  Other soldiers then came up and pushed him aside and bound the raving peasant-woman to a tree.

The butcher had hidden his little daughter and, leaning against his house, looked on in unconcern.  A foot-soldier and one of the men in armour went in and discovered the child in a copper cauldron.  Then the butcher, in desperation, took one of his knives and chased them down the street; but a band that was passing struck the knife from his grasp and hanged him by the hands to the hooks in his wall, among the flayed carcases, where he twitched his legs and jerked his head and cursed and swore till evening.

Near the churchyard, a crowd had assembled outside a long green farm-house.  The farmer stood on his threshold weeping bitter tears; as he was very fat, with a face made for smiling, the hearts of the soldiers softened in some measure as they sat in the sun with their backs to the wall, listening to him and patting his dog the while.  But the one who was dragging the child away by the hand made gestures as though to say: