The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide
trembled like a philosopher, and concealed himself as well as he could
during this heroic butchery.
At length, while the two kings were causing Te Deums to be sung in
their camps, Candide took a resolution to go and reason somewhere else
upon causes and effects. After passing over heaps of dead or dying
men, the first place he came to was a neighboring village, in the
Abarian territories, which had been burned to the ground by the
Bulgarians, agreeably to the laws of war. Here lay a number of old men
covered with wounds, who beheld their wives dying with their throats
cut, and hugging their children to their breasts, all stained with
blood. There several young virgins, whose bodies had been ripped open,
after they had satisfied the natural necessities of the Bulgarian
heroes, breathed their last; while others, half-burned in the
flames, begged to be dispatched out of the world. The ground about
them was covered with the brains, arms, and legs of dead men.
Candide made all the haste he could to another village, which
belonged to the Bulgarians, and there he found the heroic Abares had
enacted the same tragedy. Thence continuing to walk over palpitating
limbs, or through ruined buildings, at length he arrived beyond the
theater of war, with a little provision in his budget, and Miss
Cunegund's image in his heart.
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