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But one day last spring, the Bavarians filed away northward. Prussians succeeded them. Quickly came the order for the villagers to evacuate their homes. At the same time, the able-bodied, men and women, youths and maidens, were seized and held. Weeping mothers, tottering grandfathers, and helpless children,—the remnant,—were driven forth with what scant possessions they could snatch, to the town of Voyennes, four kilometres away. There, huddled with the like refugees of other villages, they remained ten days. From it they could see the ascending smoke, black by day and red by night, and hear the detonations which marked the destruction of their homes. They returned to the blackened ruins,—as, in the words of a historian of the Thirty Years’ War, their ancestors had done. “Les paysans,” he says, “qui avaient survécu à tant de désastres étaient accourus dans leurs villages aussitôt que les ennemis s’éloignèrent de ce champ de carnage. Mais, sans ressources d’aucune sorte, sans habitations, sans chevaux, sans bestiaux, sans instruments de culture, sans grains pour la semence, que pouvaient-ils faire? Mourir——”[3]