Alas! the deaths are so sudden and numerous and frightful that
there is hardly time to bury the dead. During day the survivors
are chained to the earth by hard but necessary toil; and only in
the evening, when they return from the fields, are they able,
though sinking with fatigue, to dig those other furrows, in
which their brethren are to lie heaped like grains of corn. And
this valley is not the only one that has seen the desolation.
During a series of fatal years, many villages, many towns, many
cities, many great countries, have seen, like this valley, their
hearths deserted and cold—have seen, like this valley, mourning
take the place of joy, and the death-knell substituted for the
noise of festival—have wept in the same day for their many dead,
and buried them at night by the lurid glare of torches. For,
during those fatal years, an awful wayfarer had slowly journeyed
over the earth, from one pole to the other—from the depths of
India and Asia to the ice of Siberia—from the ice of Siberia to
the borders