Madness seemed to have seized on the women of Paris. Even when the men were driven from barricades by weight of numbers or by the capture of houses on their flank, these creatures fought on with the fury of despair till they met the death which the enraged linesmen dealt out to all who fought, or seemed to have fought. Simpson, the British war correspondent, tells how he saw a brutal officer tear the red cross off the arm of a nurse who tended the Communist wounded, so that she might be done to death as a fighter[62]. Both sides, in truth, were maddened by the long and murderous struggle, which showed once again that no strife is so horrible as that of civil war. On Sunday, May 28, the last desperate band was cut down at the Cemetery Père-Lachaise, and fighting gave way to fusillades. Most of the chiefs perished without the pretence of trial, and the same fate befel thousands of National Guards, who were mown down in swathes and cast into trenches. In the last day of fighting, and the horrible time that followed, 17,000 Parisians are said to have perished[63]. Little by little, law reasserted her sway, but only to doom 9600 persons to heavy punishment. Not until 1879 did feelings of mercy prevail, and then, owing to Gambetta's powerful pleading, an amnesty was passed for the surviving Communist prisoners. [Footnote 62: _The Autobiography of William Simpson_ (London, 1903), p. 261.] [Footnote 63: G. Hanotaux, _Contemporary France_, p. 225. For further details see Lissagaray's _History of the Commune_; also personal details in Washburne's _Recollections of a Minister to France_, 1869-1877, vol. ii. chaps, ii.-vii.]