To a horrible carnage succeeded a sack and a conflagration still more horrible.  In every house entered during the first day, every human being was butchered.  The sack lasted all that day and the whole of the following, till the night of the 28th.  There was not a soldier who did not obtain an ample share of plunder, and some individuals succeeded in getting possession of two, three, and even twelve thousand ducats each.  The women were not generally outraged, but they were stripped almost entirely naked, lest they should conceal treasure which belonged to their conquerors, and they were slashed in the face with knives, partly in sport, partly as a punishment for not giving up property which was not in their possession.  The soldiers even cut off the arms of many among these wretched women, and then turned them loose, maimed and naked, into the blazing streets; for the town, on the 28th, was fired in a hundred places, and was now one general conflagration.  The streets were already strewn with the corpses of the butchered garrison and citizens; while the survivors were now burned in their houses.  Human heads, limbs, and trunks, were mingled among the bricks and rafters of the houses, which were falling on every side.  The fire lasted day and night, without an attempt being made to extinguish it; while the soldiers dashed like devils through flame and smoke in search of booty.  Bearing lighted torches, they descended into every subterrranean vault and receptacle, of which there were many in the town, and in every one of which they hoped to discover hidden treasure.  The work of killing, plundering, and burning lasted nearly three days and nights.  The streets, meanwhile, were encumbered with heaps of corpses, not a single one of which had been buried since the capture of the town.  The remains of nearly all the able bodied male population, dismembered, gnawed by dogs or blackened by fire, polluted the midsummer air meantime, the women had been again driven into the cathedral, where they had housed during the siege, and where they now crouched together in trembling expectation of their fate.’  On the 29th August, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Philip issued an order that every woman, without an exception, should be driven out of the city into the French territory.  Saint Quentin, which seventy years before had been a Flemish town, was to be re-annexed, and not a single man, woman, or child who could speak the French language was to remain another hour in the place.  The tongues of the men had been effectually silenced.  The women, to the number of three thousand five hundred, were now compelled to leave the cathedral and the city.  Some were in a starving condition; others had been desperately wounded; all, as they passed through the ruinous streets of what had been their home, were compelled to tread upon the unburied remains of their fathers, husbands, or brethren.  To none of these miserable creatures remained a living protector—­hardly even a dead body which could be recognized; and thus