Heroic butchery

There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, oboes, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons, first of all, laid flat about six thousand men on each side. Then the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who had infested its surface. The bayonet was also a “sufficient reason” for the death of several more thousands. The total dead might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.

At length, while the two kings were causing “We praise Thee, O God” to be sung each in his own camp, Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a neighbouring village that was smoldering; it was an Abare village that the Bulgars had burnt according to the laws of war. Here, old men covered with wounds beheld their wives hugging their sons, who had been massacred before their faces, to their bloody breasts. They saw some of their daughters disembowelled and breathing their last after having satisfied the natural wants of Bulgarian heroes; while others, half burnt in the flames, begged to be finished off. The earth was strewed with brains, arms, and legs.

Candide fled quickly to another village. It belonged to the Bulgars, and the Abarian heroes had treated it in the same way. . . .

—From Voltaire’s Candide, Or Optimism (1759), Chapter III