Rage, hate, and destruction had celebrated the maddest orgies on our
path, and Death, with passionate vehemence, had swung his sharpest
scythe. Wild savagery and merciless destruction had blended with the
shrewdest deliberation and skillful knowledge in constructing the bars
which the German, avoiding his own good familiar word, called barricades.
An elderly gentleman who was explaining their construction, pointed out
to us the ingenuity with which some of the barricades had been
strengthened for defence on the one side, and left comparatively weak on
the other. Every trench dug where the paving was torn up had its object,
and each heap of stones its particular design.

But the ordinary spectator needed a guide to recognize this. At the
first sight, his attention was claimed by the confused medley and the
many heart-rending signs of the horrors practised by man on man.

Here was a pool of blood, there a bearded corpse; here a blood-stained
weapon, there another blackened with powder. Like a caldron where a
witch mixes all manner of strange things for a philter, each barricade
consisted of every sort of rubbish, together with objects originally
useful. All kinds of overturned vehicles, from an omnibus to a
perambulator, from a carriage to a hand-cart, were everywhere to be
found. Wardrobes, commodes, chairs, boards, laths, bookshelves, bath
tubs and washtubs, iron and wooden pipes, were piled together, and the
interstices filled with sacks of straw and rags, mattresses, and carriage
cushions. Whence came the planks yonder, if they were not stripped from
the floor of some room? Children and promenaders had sat only yesterday
on those benches and, the night before that, oil lamps or gas flames had
burned on those lamp-posts. The sign-boards on top had invited customers
into shop or inn, and the roll of carpet beneath was perhaps to have
covered some floor to-morrow. Oleander shrubs, which I was to see later