Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/474

458 Maximilian, committed the most terrible outrages in the State of Vera Cruz in the vicinity of Orizaba. Whole villages were depopulated, or nearly so, and peaceable, unoffending citizens, shot down in cold blood from mere devilishness, by the Turcos and other troops. One Colonel Dupin was among the worst of the leaders who were concerned in the perpetration of these wholesale massacres. His motto was, "kill every man who wears leather breeches." As four-fifths of the common people of Mexico, wear leather breeches, when they wear any at all, it is evident that the proclamation of such a policy was equivalent to inaugurating a reign of terror, and a war of utter extermination.

No man was safe who attempted to pass over the roads of the state, unless he was in the uniform of the imperial army, and the residents of the most retired hamlets knew not at what moment a force of the imported cut-throats might be turned loose upon them, to kill, ravish, burn, and destroy at will. In the city of Orizaba, women were brought into the French camp and so maltreated by the Turcos that they died on the spot. Language is powerless to depict the horrors of that time. Dupin was, with all his infernal brutality, a man of courage, and repeatedly cut his way through the enemy when surrounded by a numerically superior force; but he was corralled and killed at last.

A similar character, a French colonel, met his fate in Durango during the occupation of that State. His troops caught a Mexican officer, and by his direction, shot him down in front of his own door, before the eyes of his young and lovely wife. To his astonishment the bereaved wife made no outcry, and did not reproach him for the murder. A few days later he