Round them were the soldiers, confidently and beautifully
mounted on high upon their large steeds, who tossed their wise heads
and turned their dappled wooden faces slowly from side to side,
looking contemptuously at him, Gabriel Andersen, who was soon to
behold this horror, this disgrace, and would do nothing, would not
dare to do anything. So it seemed to Gabriel Andersen; and a sense of
cold, intolerable shame gripped him as between two clamps of ice
through which he could see everything without being able to move, cry
out or utter a groan.
They took the first peasant. Gabriel Andersen saw his strange,
imploring, hopeless look. His lips moved, but no sound was heard, and
his eyes wandered. There was a bright gleam in them as in the eyes of
a madman. His mind, it was evident, was no longer able to comprehend
what was happening.
And so terrible was that face, at once full of reason and of madness,
that Andersen felt relieved when they put him face downward on the
snow and, instead of the fiery eyes, he saw his bare back
glistening--a senseless, shameful, horrible sight.
The large, red-faced soldier in a red cap pushed toward him, looked
down at his body with seeming delight, and then cried in a clear
voice:
"Well, let her go, with God's blessing!"
Andersen seemed not to see the soldiers, the sky, the horses or the
crowd.
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