Banners of flame. The exultant belch of
iridescent smoke. Cries the shape of steel rapiers. A mouth torn back to
an ear. Prayers being moaned. The sticky stench of coagulating blood.
Pillage. Outrage. Old men dragging household chattels. Figures crumpling
up in the outlandish attitudes of death. The enormous braying of
frightened cattle. A spurred heel over a face in that horrible moment
when nothing can stay its descent. The shriek of a round-bosomed girl
to the smear of wet lips across hers. The superb daring of her lover to
kill her. A babe in arms. Two. The black billowing of fireless smoke.
A child in the horse trough, knocked there from its mother's arms by the
butt end of a bayonet, its red curls quite sticky in a circle of its
little blood. A half-crazed mother with a singed eyebrow, blatting over
it and groveling on her breasts toward the stiffening figure for the
warmth they could not give; the father, a black-haired child in his
arms, tearing her by force out of the zone of buckshot, plunging back
into it himself to cover up decently, with his coat, what the horse
trough held.
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