Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/327

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 2S5 counted thirty - three corpses. By the peaceful chap. little nook or court which is called the Cite XIV " Bergere they counted thirty-seven. The slayers were many thousands of armed soldiery : the slain were of a number that never will be reck- oned ; but amongst all these slayers and all these slain there was not one combatant. There was no fight, no riot, no fray, no quarrel, no dispute.* What happened was a slaughter of unarmed men, and women, and children. Where they lay, the dead bore witness. Corpses lying apart struck deeper into people's memory than the dead who were lying in heaps. Some were haunted with the look of an old man with silver hair, whose only weapon was the umbrella which lay at his side. Some shuddered because of seeing the gay idler of the Boulevard sitting dead against the wall of a house, and scarce parted from the cigar which lay on the ground near his hand. Some carried in their minds the sight of a printer's boy leaning back against a shop-front, because, though the lad was killed, the proof-sheets which he was carrying had remained in his hands, and were red with his blood, and were fluttering in the wind.f The military historian of these achieve- the western extremity of the Boulevard Montmartre. + For accounts of the state of the Boulevard after the massacre, see the written statements of eyewitnesses supplied to Victor Hugo, and printed in his narrative. It will be seen that I do not adopt M. Victor Hugo's conclusions ; but there is no reason for questioning the authenticity or the truth of the statements which he lias collected.
 * I speak here of the Boulevard from the Rue du Seuticr to