What a situation!--just imagine it, Fritz, for respectable citizens, merchants, bankers, brewers, innkeepers--peaceable men who wanted nothing but peace and quietness. I have always thought, since then, that the landwehr system is a very bad one, and that it is much better to pay a good army of volunteers, who are attached to the country, and know that their pay, pensions, and decorations come from the nation and not from the government; young men devoted to their country like those of '92, and full of enthusiasm, because they are respected and honored in proportion to their sacrifices. Yes, this is what they ought to be--and not men who are thinking of their wives and children. Our balls struck down these poor fathers and husbands by the dozen. To add to all these abominations, two other companies, sent out with the greatest secrecy by the council of defence from the posterns of the guard and of the German gate, and which came up, one by the Saverne road, and the other by the road of Petit-Saint-Jean, now began to outflank them, and forming behind them, fired upon them in the rear. It must be confessed that these old soldiers of the Empire had a diabolical talent for stratagem! Who would ever have imagined such a stroke! On seeing this, the remnant of the landwehr disbanded on the great white plain like a whirlwind of sparrows. Those who had not had time to put on their shoes did not mind the stones or briers or thorns of the Fiquet bottom; they ran like stags, the stoutest as fast as the rest. Our soldiers followed them as skirmishers, stopping not a second except to make ready and fire. All the ground in front, up to the old beech in the middle of the meadow of Quatre-Vents, was covered with their bodies. Their colonel, a burgomaster doubtless, galloped before them on horseback, his shirt flying out behind him. If the Baden soldiers, quartered in the village, had not come to their assistance, they would all have been exterminated. But two battalions of Baden men being deployed at the right of Quatre-Vents, our trumpets sounded the recall, and the four companies formed in the alley _des Dames_ to await them. The Baden soldiers then halted, and the last of the Wurtemburgers passed behind them, glad to escape from such a terrible destruction. They could well say: "I know what war is--I have seen it at the worst!" It was now seven o'clock--the whole city was on the ramparts. Soon a thick smoke rose above the tile-kiln and the surrounding buildings; some sappers had gone out with fagots and set it on fire. It was all burned to cinders; nothing remained but a great black space, and some rubbish behind the poplars. Our four companies, seeing that the Baden soldiers did not mean to attack them, returned quietly, the trumpeter leading.