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Achilles himself, they say, got tired of eating, and though he consumed something like a prize ox to his own cheek, he at length had to call for cheese, so that we at last gave in, and having cleared away the broken tumbrels and baggage-carts of our army, cleared for a general action.
To the great cemetery within the Close the people brought their dead, the tumbrels discharging their load of corpses all day long, tilting them into the huge pits made ready to receive them; the stench of putrefaction palpitating through the air, and borne by the gusts of the western breeze through the windows of the palace, where the Bishop's official sat, as the candidates knelt before him and received institution with the usual formalities.
Beginning at twilight, the wagons with the wounded came all night long. Ambulances, farm wagons, carts, family carriages, heavy-laden, they rumbled over the cobblestones with the sound of the tumbrels in the Terror. It was stated that a number of the wounded were in the field hospitals.
The Bastille stormed; the Swiss Guard slaughtered; the Reign of Terror, with its daily procession of tumbrels through the streets of Paris; the murder of that amiable and well-meaning gentleman who did his best to atone for the sins of his ancestors; the fearful months of waiting suffered by his Queen before she, too, went to her death.
Like the Paris mobs that followed shouting, in the wake of the tumbrels bound for the guillotine, these men came trooping back to the scene of execution, and as they came they bellowed hoarsely and they waved their arms. Men react powerfully to environment; they put on rough ways with rough clothes.
This old knave is right. Accursed be the day when the genius of invention thrilled your sublime brain! A grand discovery you have made, forsooth! What have I gained from it? Grand illusions, grand discomfitures! What hath it availed me that I passed whole nights discussing with you breech-loaders, screw-plates, tumbrels, sockets, bridges, ovoid balls, and spring-locks?
And right through the crowd, from the distant crossway, an army of street-sweepers was advancing in file down the road, the brooms swishing rhythmically, while scavengers provided with forks pitched the collected refuse into tumbrels, which at intervals of a score of paces halted with a noise like the chattering of broken pots.
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