You Think You Have It Bad?

Mark Twain said,  "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog." There is another thing that the now "politically incorrect" author wrote in his last book, 'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc' which is more history than fiction. It shows the serious, spiritual side, of this very earthy humorist. Sometimes, when I think we have it bad, I read Twains description of Paris in 1410: “In Paris, mobs roared through the streets nightly, seeking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted. The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings, and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked by thieves, the unholy gleaners after the mob. None had the courage to gather these dead for burial; they were left there to rot and create plagues. And plagues they did create. Epidemics swept away the people like flies, and the burials were conducted secretly and by night, for public funerals were not allowed, lest the revelation of the magnitude of the plague’s work unman the people and plunge them into despair.  Then came, finally, the bitterest winter which had visited France in five hundred years.  Famine, pestilence, slaughter, ice, snow- Paris had all these at once. The dead lay in heaps about the streets, and wolves entered the city in daylight and devoured them.”