I was very glad when a halt was called and we were ordered to find what shelter we could, the regiment being far in advance of the main body. The Germans had sadly devastated the country. We passed over many miles of country in which scarcely so much as the shell of a house was left standing: all were charred and blackened; and men, women and children were found murdered. The bodies of two young boys under twelve years of age lay on the roof of a low outhouse. They had been bayoneted and thrown there, nobody could surmise why. Some bodies were burnt to cinders, and others had been torn and partly eaten by swine and dogs. The dogs, by-the-by, were numerous, and very fierce brutes. In some spots, where the Germans had bivouacked, the heads and offal of pigs showed that they had shot some of these animals, and also killed ducks and fowls, for food, and cooked them at open-air fires made of the belongings of the peasantry. Chairs and tables were left outside, just in the positions in which they had evidently been used. A dish-cover was left on one table, and when it was raised it revealed two pairs of human hands severed at the wrists. The men to whom these hands had belonged, and a woman, were found shot in the farm-house. All were old people, as nearly all the murdered persons were, except some young women and children. Besides the two boys already mentioned, a younger child and a little girl of about fourteen years were seen lying on the ground. The cause of the death of the girl did not appear, and it was probably caused by fright. A woman clasping her baby had been shot. The bodies had, in many cases, been treated with disgusting irreverence. Even a hunchbacked man had been shot, and a poor old fellow with beard and hair as white as snow. One sturdy dame seemed to have attempted to fight for her life, for she held a hoe in her dead hands. Her body was riddled by bullets. To escape the rain I climbed up the half-burnt rafters of a cottage to a room in which a portion of the floor and a corner of the roof were still in position--I cannot say intact. Here, in imminent danger of a fall, I slept the instant I stretched myself on the boards. Below were a score of exhausted soldiers, too utterly weary to care a rap for danger from falling walls: and long and soundly we all slept.