MacMahon, however, only dared attempt the assault with his best troops, so redoubtable was this position, so great the renown of Montmartre. Two entire army corps assailed it by the Rues Lepic, Mercadet, and the Chaussee Clignancourt. From time to time some shots were fired from a few houses; forthwith frightened columns came to a stand-still and began regular sieges. These 20,000 men, who completely surrounded Montmartre, helped by the artillery established on the terre-plein of the enceinte, took three hours to climb these positions, defended without method by a few dozen tirailleurs. At eleven o'clock the cemetery was taken, and shortly after the troops reached the Chateau-Rouge. In the environs there were some fusillades, but the few obstinate men who still fought were soon killed, or withdrew discouraged at their isolation. The Versaillese, scrambling up to the Buttes by all the acclivities that lead to them, at mid-day installed themselves at the Moulin de la Galette, descended by the Place St. Pierre to the mairie, and occupied the whole of the eighteenth arrondissement without any resistance. Thus without a battle, without an assault, without even a protestation of despair, was this impregnable fortress abandoned, from which a few hundred resolute men might have kept the whole Versaillese army in check, and constrained the Assembly to come to terms. Hardly arrived at Montmartre, the Versaillese staff offered a holocaust to the manes of Lecomte and Clement-Thomas. Forty-two men, three women, and four children were conducted to No. 6 in the Rue des Rosiers and forced to kneel bare-headed before the wall, at the foot of which the generals had been executed on the 18th March; then they were killed. A woman, who held her child in her arms, refused to kneel down, and cried to her companions, "Show these wretches that you know how to die upright." On the following day these massacres continued. Each batch of prisoners halted some time before this wall, marked with bullets, and were then despatched on the slope of the Buttes that overlooks the St. Denis route.[185] The Batignolles and Montmartre witnessed the first wholesale massacres. Every individual wearing a uniform or regulation boots was shot, as a matter of course, without questions put, without explanations given. Thus the Versaillese had been assassinating since the morning in the Square des Batignolles, Place de l'Hotel-de-Ville, and at the gate of Clichy. The Parc Monceaux was their principal slaughter-house in the seventeenth arrondissement. At Montmartre the centres of massacre were the Buttes, the Elysee, of which every step was strewn with corpses, and the exterior boulevards.