Nine hundred and thirty executioners, in the shape of an entire regiment, were to send their victims, marshalled in a row, into eternity at the same moment. At the order “Fire!” four bullets struck at the life of the victims, all of whom are tied to a rope stretched from tree to tree. Strange—when the smoke arose, only half were found dead. The rest remained either wounded or untouched. The unscathed stared in horror; the wounded screamed to be despatched. The soldiers could not fire again. Some of the prisoners had freed themselves, and were escaping. The dragoons were ordered forward to cut them down. The victims were killed piece-meal. One man, a mayor of his town, reached the river, but there his bleeding hand betrayed him, and he was cast into the river. The soldiers protested against the use to which they were put. The massacres lasted until night-fall. Yet when the grave-diggers came next morning, some hearts still beat. The sextons put the martyrs out of their misery at once by blows on the head with their pickaxes. “We are purging the land,” wrote Collet d’Herbois to the Convention. Every day twenty-two were regularly shot. By this time, the fear of life rendered death sweet. Girls, men, children, prayed that they might be shot with their parents. Sometimes they permitted this, and little boys and girls were shot, holding their father’s hands. Women who were seen to shed tears at executions, were shot. Mourning was prohibited under pain of death. One lad of fourteen, says, “Quick—quick! You have killed papa! I want to overtake him!” One De Rochefort[2] was accompanied by a son to the butchering-ground, whither he went with three relatives. The men fell—the boy, aged fifteen, remained standing. The executioner hesitated—the people murmured. “God save the King!” cried De Rochefort. A moment—a report—he fell, shattered to death. A lovely girl, fourteen, is brought before the judge for refusing to wear the national cockade. “Why do you refuse to wear it?” asks the judge. “Because you _do_!” replies the child. Her beauty, rather than justice, pleading for her, a sign was made that a wreath should be put in her hair, the emblem of liberation. She cast it upon the ground. She died. A man came to the Hall of Justice. “You have slain my father, my brothers, my wife—kill me. My religion forbids me to destroy myself. In mercy, kill me.” In mercy—they killed him. A woman, who had fought bravely in the earlier and fairer time of the Revolution, was carried to the scaffold, though about to become a mother. She did not fear death—she pleaded for the other life. She was laughed at—hooted—and so died. A girl of seventeen, and much resembling Charlotte Corday, was accused of having served as an artillerist in the trenches of the forces opposed to the national forces. “What is your name?” “Mary; the name of the mother of the God for whom I am about to die.” “Your age?” “Seventeen; the age of Charlotte Corday.”