It was here, on passing the first houses of the village, that I
felt the heat to be almost unbearable; it seemed strange to me, I
remember, that they (whoever "they" were), having so many trees here,
a forest that stretched many miles behind them, should have chosen to
pitch their village upon the only exposed and torrid bit of ground
that they could find. Behind us was the forest, in front of us also
the forest, but here, how the sun blazed down on the roofs and little
blown patches of garden, how it glared in through the broken windows,
and penetrated into the darkest corners of the desolate rooms!
Poor N----! In the second month of the war it had been shelled and
many of the houses destroyed. The buildings that remained seemed to
have given up the struggle and abandoned themselves to inevitable
degradation. Moreover, down the principal street, at every other door
there hung the sinister black flag, a piece of dirty black cloth
fastened to a stick, and upon the filthy wall was scrawled in Russian
"cholera.
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