"Horror breathing from the silent ground." |
"It was a piteous sight," said our guide, "to see, the next day, the men, with clasped hands, begging for a glass of water. Some had lost one side of the face with a sabre-cut; others had their bowels lain open! They prayed us to put an end to their miseries, and said, 'surely God would forgive us.' All the peasants, men, women, and children, that had not been driven clear away, came in to serve them; but there were not enough; and they died, burned with thirst, and their wounds gangrened, for there were not surgeons for the half of them. They would crawl down to those pools of water and wash their wounds; the water was red and clotted with blood. Oh, c'est un grand malheur, la guerre, mesdames!" he concluded. Martin would be an eloquent agent for our friend Ladd's Peace Society.
Belgium is a perfect garden. Between Brussels and Liege, a distance of sixty miles, we did not see, over all the vast plain, one foot of unused earth. There are crops of wheat, rye, oats, beans, and pease, and immense cabbage plantations, with no enclosures, neither fences nor hedges; no apparent division of property. You might fancy the land was under the dominion of an agrarian law, and that each child of man might take an equal share from mother earth; but, alas! when the table is thread there is many a one left without a cover.
On arriving at the depôt, a league from Leige, we
