resistance was long and obstinate; but at length two gates were forced open by the besiegers, and Tilly, marching a part of his infantry into the town, immediately occupied the principal streets, and with pointed cannon drove the citizens into their dwellings, there to await their destiny. Nor were they held long in suspense; a word from Tilly decided the fate of Magdeburg. Even a more humane general would have attempted in vain to restrain such soldiers; but Tilly never once made the attempt. The silence of their general left the soldiers masters of the citizens; and they broke, without restraint, into the houses to gratify every brutal appetite. The prayers of innocence excited some compassion in the hearts of the Germans, but none in the rude breasts of Pappenheim's Walloons. Scarcely had the massacre commenced, when the other gates were thrown open, and the cavalry, with the fearful hordes of Croats, poured in upon the devoted town.

Now began a scene of massacre and outrage which history has no language, poetry no pencil, to portray. Neither the innocence of childhood, nor the helplessness of old age, neither youth nor sex, neither rank nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. Wives were dishonored in the very arms of their husbands, daughters at the feet of their parents, and the defenceless sex exposed to the double loss of virtue and life. No condition, however obscure, or however sacred, could afford protection against the cruelty or rapacity of the enemy. Fifty-three women were found in a single church with their heads cut off! The Croats amused themselves with throwing children into the flames, and Pappenheim's Walloons with stabbing infants at their mothers' breasts! Some officers of the League, horror-struck at scenes so dreadful, ven

tured to remind Tilly, that he had it in his power to stop the carnage. "Return in an hour," was his answer, "and I will see what is to be done; the soldier must have some recompense for his dangers and toils!"

No orders came from the general to check these horrors, which continued without abatement till the smoke and flames at last stopped the course of the plunderers. To increase the confusion, and break the resistance of the inhabitants, the invaders had, in the commencement of the assault, fired the town in several places; and a tempest now arose, and spread the flames with frightful rapidity, till the blaze became universal, and forced the victors to pause awhile in their work of rapine and carnage. The confusion was deepened by the clouds of smoke. the clash of swords, the heaps of dead bodies strewing the ground, the crash of falling ruins, and the streams of blood which ran along the streets. The atmosphere glowed; and the intolerable heat finally compelled even the murderers to take refuge in their camp. In less than twelve hours, this strong, populous and flourishing city, one of the finest in all Germany, was a heap of ashes, with the exception of only two churches, and a few houses.

Scarcely had the flames abated, when the soldiers returned to satiate anew their rage for plunder amid the ruins and ashes of the town. Multitudes were suffocated by the smoke; but many found rich booty in the cellars where the citizens had concealed their most valuable effects. At length Tilly himself appeared in the town after the streets had been cleared of ashes and corpses. Horrible and revolting to humanity was the scene that presented itself! The few survivors crawling from under the dead; little children wandering about, with heart-rending cries, in quest of their parents now no more; and

infants still sucking the dead bodies of their mothers! More than five thousand bodies were thrown into the Elbe just to clear the streets; a far greater number had been consumed by the flames; the entire amount of the slaughter was estimated at thirty thousand; and in gratitude to the God of peace for such horrid success in the butchery of his children, for this triumph of Christian over Christian in blood, and fire, and rapine, and brutal lust, a solemn mass was performed, and Te Deum sụng amid the discharge of artillery!!

Just think of the siege of Ismail with its 70,000 victims, of Ostend with its 120,000, of Mexico with its 150,000, of Carthage with its 700,000, of Jerusalem with more than a million, of Troy with nearly two millions; and you may form some faint conception of the atrocities and woes with which this single department of warfare has covered the earth.

SECTION V.

BATTLES.

It is difficult for any one, not familiar by experi ence with the horrid reality, to form any adequate conception of a battle. Carlyle calls it " a terrible conjugation of the verb to kill-I kill, thou killest, he kills; we kill, ye kill, they kill, all kill." Such is every battle; and mark the result. In the sea

fight at Copenhagen, the wheels of the cannon soon became so clogged by those who fell, that the survivors at intervals cleared the decks by throwing legs, and arms, and shattered bodies overboard as they would have shovelled out a pig-sty. A man, now member of a church in the city of New York, told

his pastor he was at the battle of Lodi, followed Napoleon across its memorable bridge, and there waded ankle-deep in the mire of human flesh trampled and crushed to jelly by the horses and cannon that had passed over them.

An American officer once called " a field of battle THE VERIEST HELL UPON EARTH ;" and vividly does one of our best writers describe the infernal scene: "Imagine a celestial spirit, on an errand of mercy, descending upon our globe, and led by chance to an European plain at the point of some great battle. On a sudden, the field of combat opens on his astonished vision. It is a field which men call glorious. A hundred thousand warriors stand in opposing ranks. Light gleams on their burnished steels. Their plumes and banners wave. Hill echoes to hill the noise of moving rank and squadron, the neigh and tramp of steeds, the trumpet, drum and bugle-call.

"There is a momentary pause, a silence like that which precedes the fall of the thunderbolt, like that awful stillness which is precursor to the desolating rage of the whirlwind. In an instant, flash succeeding flash, pours columns of smoke along the plain. The iron tempest sweeps, heaping man, horse and car in undistinguished ruin. In shouts of rushing hosts, in shock of breasting steeds, in peals of musketry, in the roar of artillery, in the clash of sabres, in thick and gathering clouds of smoke and dust, all human eye, and ear, and sense are lost. Man sees not, but the sight of onset. Man hears not,

but the cry of onward!

"Not so the celestial stranger. His spiritual eye unobscured by artificial night, his spiritual ear unaffected by mechanic noise, witness the real scene, naked in all its cruel horrors. He sees lopped and bleeding limbs scattered; gashed, dismembered

trunks outspread; gore-clotted, lifeless brains bursting from crushed skulls; blood gushing from sabred necks; severed heads, whose mouths mutter rage amidst the palsying of the last agony. He hears the mingled cry of anguish and despair issuing from a thousand bosoms in which a thousand bayonets turn; the convulsive scream of anguish from heaps of mangled, half-expiring victims, over whom the heavy artillery wheels lumber and crush into one mass, bone, and muscle, and sinew, while the fetlock of the war-horse drips with blood starting from the last palpitation of the burst heart on which his foot pivots. This is not earth,' would not such a celestial stranger exclaim? 'this is not earth-this is hell! This is not man, but demon tormenting demon!""

6

Wait till another morn, and then go over that field. Wherever your eye now turns, you behold men, and horses, and weapons, and broken carriages, all mingled in most shocking confusion. At every step, you tread in blood that only yesterday flowed, warm as your own, in the veins of a father, a son or a brother. Here is a wretch with his limbs horribly mangled, yet still alive; and there is another all covered with blood, and crushed by the tread of the war-horse, or the wheels of cannon passing over him Yonder is an athletic frame that had struggled hard against his pains, and survived his mortal wounds long enough in his anguish to gnaw the turf with his teeth, and plough the earth with his hands. Here is another still that had dragged himself along in his own gore till death kindly released him from his agonies; and yonder is a young man of fair form and noble mien, who felt the dews of death fast settling on his brow, and, knowing his hour had come, pulled from his bosom the last letter of a mother, the picture of a wife, or the braided lock of a loved