290 
THE CABINET OF NATURAL HISTORY 
saw something that made me speedily forget the old woman, 
though what it was I did see, I could not, in the first mo- 
ments of amazement and horror, very distinctly compre- 
hend. 
“Above a hundred dead bodies lay and sat before my 
eyes, all of them apparently in the very attitude or pos- 
ture in which they died. I looked at them for at least a 
minute, before I knew they were all corpses. Something 
in the mortal silence of the place told me that I alone was 
alive in this dreadful company. A desperate courage ena- 
bled me then to look stedfastly at the scene before me. 
The bodies were mostly clothed in mats and rugs, and tat- 
tered great-coats; some of them merely wrapped round with 
girdles of straw; and two or three perfectly naked. Every 
face had a different expression, but all painful, horrid, ago- 
nized, bloodless: many glazed eyes were wide open; and, 
perhaps, this was the most shocking thing in the whole 
spectacle. So many eyes that saw not, all seemingly fixed 
upon different objects; some cast up to heaven, some look- 
ing strait forward, and some with the white orbs turned 
round, and deep sunk in, the sockets. 
“It was a sort of hospital. These wretched beings were 
mostly all desperately or mortally wounded; and after 
having been stripped by their comrades, they had been left 
there dead and to die. Such were they, who, as the old 
hag said, would not trouble me. 
“I had begun to view this ghastly sight with some com- 
posure, when I saw, at the remotest part of the hospital, a 
gigantic figure sitting, covered with blood, and almost naked, 
upon a rude bedstead, with his back leaning against the 
wall, and his eyes fixed directly on mine. I thought he was 
alive, and shuddered; but he was stone dead. In the last 
agonies he had bitten his under lip almost entirely off, and 
his long black beard was drenched in clotted gore, that like- 
wise lay in large blots on his shaggy bosom. One of his 
hands had convulsively grasped the wood-work of the bed- 
stead, which had been crushed in the grasp. I recognised 
the corpse. He was a serjeant in a grenadier regiment, 
and, during the retreat, distinguished for acts of savage 
valour. One day he killed, with his own hand, Harry 
Warburton, the right hand man of my own company, per- 
haps the finest made and most powerful man in the British 
army. My soldiers had nick-named him with a very 
coarse appellation, and I really felt as if he and I were ac- 
quaintances. There he sat, as if frozen to death. I went 
up to the body, and raising up the giant’s muscular arm, it 
fell down again with a hollow sound against the bloody side 
of the corpse. 
“My eyes unconsciously wandered along the walls. 
They were covered with grotesque figures and caricatures 
of the English, absolutely drawn in blood. Horrid blas- 
phemies, and the most shocking obscenities in the shape of 
songs, were in like manner written there ; and you may 
guess what an effect they had upon me, when the wretches 
who had conceived them lay all dead corpses around my 
feet. I saw two books lying on the floor; I lifted them up; 
one seemed to be full of the most hideous obscenity; the 
other was the Bible. It is impossible to tell you the horror 
produced in me by the circumstance. The books fell from 
my hand; they fell upon the breast of one of the bodies; it 
was a woman’s breast. A woman had lived and died in 
such a place as this! What had been in that heart, now 
still, perhaps only a few hours before, I knew not. It is 
possible, love, strong as death; love, guilty, abandoned, de- 
praved, and linked by vice unto misery: but still love, that 
perished but with the last throb, and yearned in the last 
convulsion towards some one of these grim dead bodies. I 
think some such idea as this came across me at the time; or 
has it now only arisen ? 
“Near this corpse lay that of a perfect.boy, certainly not 
more than seventeen years of age. There was a little cop- 
per figure of the Virgin Mary round his neck, suspended 
by a chain of hair. It was of little value, else it had not 
been suffered to l'emain there. In his- hand was a letter; I 
saw enough to know that it was from his mother ; — Mon 
chere fils, SfC. It was a 1 terrible place to think of mother — 
of home — of any social human ties. Have these ghastly 
things parents, brothers, sisters, lovers? Were they once 
all happy in peaceful homes? Did these convulsed, and 
bloody, and mangled bodies once lie in undisturbed beds? 
Did those clutched hands once press in infancy a mother’s 
breast? Now all was loathsome, terrible, ghostlike. Hu- 
man nature itself seemed here to be debased and brutified. 
Will sueh creatures, I thought, ever live again? Why 
should they? Robbers, ravishers, incendiaries, murderers, 
suicides, (for a dragoon lay with a pistol in his hand, and 
his skull shattered to pieces,) heroes! The only two pow- 
ers that reigned here were agony and death. Whatever 
might have been their characters when alive, all faces were 
now alike. I could not, In those fixed extortions, tell what 
was pain from what was anger — misery from wickedness. 
“It was now almost dark, and the night was setting in 
stormier than the day. A strong flash of lightning sudden- 
ly illuminated this hold of death, and for a moment showed 
me more distinctly the terrible array. A loud squall of 
wind came round about the building, and the old window 
casement gave way, and fell with a shivering crash in upon 
the floor. Something rose up with an angry growl from 
amongst the dead bodies. It was a huge dark-coloured wolf 
dog, with a spiked collar round his neck; and seeing me, he 
leaped forwards with gaunt and bony limbs. I am confi- 
dent that his jaws were bloody. I had instinctively moved 
