" The cellar was spattered with blood, with bodies that showed death in a dozen horrid ways. Wine-racks stood by the walls, looted empty, but the floor was black with Spanish blood, strewn with mutilations obscene as nightmare. Young, old, men and women, all killed horribly. It struck Sharpe that these people must have died the day before, as he watched from the hilltop, killed as the French pretended the village was empty. "
― Bernard Cornwell , Sharpe's Gold (Sharpe, #9)