that would listen, that their father or mother, or perhaps both, rode or marched in that grand display?
Like everyone else, you would have stood upon those high battlements, in the pennant-snapping dawn breeze. You would have seen the six armies, arranged in orderly fashion in the huge courtyard. You would have heard the turning of the mechanism that opened the gates, and you would have felt the battlements tremble as the massive gates groaned open.
You would have heard the marching feet of soldiers then, and the rumble of hooves and the creak of the wheels of wains, and as those sounds receded into the distance you would have again heard the gates as they closed.
It is then that you truly hear it-- the oppressive silence that had underscored the leaving of the departing soldiers. You see it in the eyes of that little girl there before you, who clings to her mother's leg and stares, suffused, mute, and immobile, fearing to move lest she step upon the shards of her own broken life.
You see those two there, by the standard to your left? Those two sisters? They came out wearing their prettiest peasant dresses for their husbands, who in their turn had watched their young war brides until the inhabitants of Lund were lost to their sight. The two girls have a pitiable, wilted look about them now. The light in their eyes has died. The dread that pervades the air has left them too stunned for the moment to feel grief. That will come later.