You doubt it?
My dear fellow, on the road to Lons-le-Saulnier they will show you, if you are curious, the spot where not six months ago they organized a slaughter fit to turn the stomach of our most ferocious troopers on the battlefield.

Picture to yourself a tumbrel of prisoners on their way to Lons-le-Saulnier.

It was a staff-sided cart, one of those immense wagons in which they take cattle to market.

There were some thirty men in this tumbrel, whose sole crime was foolish exaltation of thought and threatening language.

They were bound and gagged; heads hanging, jolted by the bumping of the cart; their throats parched with thirst, despair and terror; unfortunate beings who did not even have, as in the times of Nero and Commodus, the fight in the arena, the hand-to-hand struggle with death.