itself up to flee also, and in the distance its leaden casque fell from it. The flames of the city no longer gleamed. Columns of black smoke moved from east to west. Powder and ashes, raised by the whirling winds, moved in the same direction. The sky was no longer the sky, but a leaden canopy, strangely agitated.
“Everything is fleeing; everything is going from this place of desolation,” I said to Don Roque. “The French will find nothing.”
“Nothing. Today they enter by the Puerta del Angel. They say that the capitulation has been honorable. Look, here come the spectres who defend the plaza!”
Indeed along the Coso filed the last combatants, one for every thousand of those who had faced the bullets and the epidemic. There were fathers without sons, brothers without brothers, husbands without wives. He who cannot find his own among the living is not at all sure of finding them among the dead, because there are fifty-two thousand corpses, almost all piled in the streets, the doorways, the cellars, the ditches. The French, on entering, halted affrighted at such a spectacle, and were almost on the point of retreating. Tears streamed from their eyes, and they asked whether these were men or shadows, these poor creatures who fled at sight of them.
A volunteer on entering his house stumbled over the bodies of his wife and children. A wife ran to the wall, to the trench, to the barricade to look for her husband; but no one knew where he was. The thousands of the dead did not speak; and could not tell whether her Fulano was among them. Many large families were exterminated, not one member was left. This saves many tears when death strikes with one blow the father and the orphan, the husband and the widow, the victim and the eyes that would have been forced to weep.
France had at last set foot within that city built on the banks of the classic river which gives its name to our peninsula.