182 BEFORE AND AFTER ITS FALL 
city were the visible dead marshalled in such awful hosts as in the 
immediate vicinity of the cathedral and the Place de Moullace. 
One could not escape the thought that, gay and mercurial as was 
the daily life of St. Pierre, its citizens had flocked in greater num- 
bers than usual to the shadow of the cross during the four days 
of anxiety and final panic that preceded the climax. 
“ When Pickett on the last day of Gettysburg hurled his legions 
in the final assault upon Hancock's Second Corps, it was said that 
over the ground traversed by that great charge from Seminary 
Ridge to the point held by Webb's Philadelphia brigade a man _ 
might have walked literally upon the bodies of the slain. Could 
he have done so, he must have picked his way. In the Place de 
Moullace of St: Pierre, and immediately surrounding the cathedral, 
one could hardly so pick his way as to escape walking upon the 
bodies of the dead. It was no exaggeration when Consul Ayme, of 
Guadeloupe, said that the streets of St. Pierre were paved with the 
corpses of her citizens. 
“Some crude effort had been made to destroy by fire the 
grewsome relics spared by the original cataclysm, but the work had 
been done all too ineffectively. Fagots of driftwood, piled around 
and above heaps of the slain, had been fired by negroes employed 
for that purpose, but the work of cremation was only partly accom- 
plished. From a sanitary point of view it is fortunate for Martin- 
ique that the vast majority of those who died when her chief city 
was annihilated are buried so deep as to need no better sepulchre. 
“Within the walls of the cathedral the ruin was complete. Even 
the altar was not spared, though one of the earliest rescuing parties 
upon the ground succeeded in saving the candelabra, the chalice 
and other holy vessels, and persons of a deeply devout bent of mind 
soon found in this an evidence of miraculous intervention,