walls was massacred. Think you, amidst the shrieks of violated innocence

and helpless infancy, I did not feel in every nerve the cry of a fellow

being? They were men and women, the sufferers, before they were Mahometans,

and when they rise turbanless from the grave, in what except their good or

evil actions will they be the better or worse than we? Two soldiers

contended for a girl, whose rich dress and extreme beauty excited the

brutal appetites of these wretches, who, perhaps good men among their

families, were changed by the fury of the moment into incarnated evils. An

old man, with a silver beard, decrepid and bald, he might be her

grandfather, interposed to save her; the battle axe of one of them clove

his skull. I rushed to her defence, but rage made them blind and deaf; they

did not distinguish my Christian garb or heed my words--words were blunt

weapons then, for while war cried "havoc," and murder gave fit echo, how

could I--

Turn back the tide of ills, relieving wrong

With mild accost of soothing eloquence?

One of the fellows, enraged at my interference, struck me with his bayonet

in the side, and I fell senseless.

This wound will probably shorten my life, having shattered a frame, weak

of itself. But I am content to die. I have learnt in Greece that one man,

more or less, is of small import, while human bodies remain to fill up the

thinned ranks of the soldiery; and that the identity of an individual may

be overlooked, so that the muster roll contain its full numbers. All this

212

The Last Man