Abares

The Abares are presented as a people and as one of the armies fighting the Bulgarians, in a war whose celebrated military spectacle is set against enormous loss of life and the destruction of villages. Their role in the conflict becomes especially stark when they answer the burning of an Abarian settlement by devastating a Bulgarian one, making retaliation part of the same pattern of violence.

Identity and Place in the War

The Abares appear as one of two opposing forces in a battle described through its armies, weapons, and casualties. The account does not establish their commanders, political aims, or military organization; it shows them chiefly through the fighting and its effects on the people living in the war zone.

Their identity is also tied to the villages caught between the armies. One settlement is identified as Abarian and burned by the Bulgarians. A Bulgarian village is then found in a comparable state after the Abares have attacked it. The opposing labels mark the sides of the conflict, while the matching destruction makes their human consequences difficult to distinguish.

Battle and Scale of Loss

The battle is initially presented as a pageant of military display, with trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon accompanying the two armies. That spectacle gives way almost immediately to an estimate of mass death: cannon fire kills about six thousand men on each side, muskets kill another nine or ten thousand, and bayonets cause the deaths of several thousand more. The passage puts the total at roughly thirty thousand lives, without separating the final overall count by army.

Candide hides during the fighting and leaves only when the two kings have ordered a Te Deum in their respective camps. His departure carries him across the battlefield’s dead and dying toward the villages beyond it. The contrast between the armies’ ceremonial celebration and the casualties around them makes the cost of the conflict more prominent than any account of victory.

Retaliation and Civilian Consequences

The first village Candide reaches is Abarian. The Bulgarians have burned it according to the Laws and Usages of War. The survivors and the destruction there reveal that the battle’s violence extends beyond the opposing troops: families and other civilians have been killed, and the settlement is left in ruins.

Candide flees to a Bulgarian village and finds that the Abares have treated it in the same way. The parallel establishes reciprocal destruction rather than a single isolated attack. Later, Pangloss reports that the Abares have taken revenge by doing the same to a neighboring barony belonging to a Bulgarian lord. His account connects the village scenes to a continuing cycle of reprisals, in which one side’s devastation is answered with devastation on the other.

Narrative Significance

The Abares’ role in the war is defined by the tension between the language of military custom and what the conflict does to inhabitants of the villages. The phrase Laws and Usages of War accompanies the Bulgarians’ burning of an Abarian settlement, while the Abares’ retaliation reproduces the same harm against a Bulgarian community. In this account, reciprocity does not restore balance; it extends destruction across the opposing population.

Candide’s passage through both ruined villages gives the war a civilian scale that the formal spectacle of the armies conceals. The Abares are not developed as individual characters, and the narrative supplies no independent account of their motives. Instead, their actions and the destruction attributed to them complete the depiction of a conflict in which each side’s violence becomes justification for the next.