We had not pictured the scenes which were happening so near.
Now in the streets the truth broke upon us, and drove the blood from our cheeks.

A hundred yards, the turning of a corner, sufficed.

We who but yesterday left the country, who only a week before were boys, careless as other boys, not recking of death at all, were plunged now into the midst of horrors I cannot describe.

And the awful contrast between the sky above and the things about us! Even now the lark was singing not far from us; the sunshine was striking the topmost storeys of the houses; the fleecy clouds were passing overhead, the freshness of a summer morning was-- Ah! where was it?
Not here in the narrow lanes surely, that echoed and re-echoed with shrieks and curses and frantic prayers: in which bands of furious men rushed up and down, and where archers of the guard and the more cruel rabble were breaking in doors and windows, and hurrying with bloody weapons from house to house, seeking, pursuing, and at last killing in some horrid corner, some place of darkness--killing with blow on blow dealt on writhing bodies! Not here, surely, where each minute a child, a woman died silently, a man snarling like a wolf--happy if he had snatched his weapon and got his back to the wall: where foul corpses dammed the very blood that ran down the kennel, and children--little children--played with them! I was at Cahors in 1580 in the great street fight; and there women were killed, I was with Chatillon nine years later, when he rode through the Faubourgs of Paris, with this very day and his father Coligny in his mind, and gave no quarter.

I was at Courtas and Ivry, and more than once have seen prisoners led out to be piked in batches--ay, and by hundreds! But war is war, and these were its victims, dying for the most part under God's heaven with arms in their hands: not men and women fresh roused from their sleep.