To come back to the Point du Jour--that is as much a ruin as the town of
St. Cloud. From the gate to the Railway Station there is not a single
habitable house; not three have roofs, and not one has its windows and
walls intact. Every lamppost has been scattered about the road in small
pieces, and a stranger who had not heard of the bombardment might be
pardoned for supposing that the streets had been macadamized with the
fragments of shells. Strange to say, the staircase leading from the
Booking Office of the Railway Station to the line over head is
uninjured, or nearly so, and by its means I was enabled to ascend and
walk through that Viaduct which I have been looking at from a distance
as shells have been battering it for the last six weeks. It is much
knocked about, and so is the bridge underneath it, which in a series of
arches spans the river, but both will be serviceable still after some
repair. Huge stones, displaced from their settings and broken into
small pieces, lie scattered on the bridge and its approaches. From the
Viaduct I could see an immense conflagration in the neighbourhood of the
Champ de Mars, and a combat between the troops and the Insurgents was
going on. In the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli, all down to
the Trocadero, reserves were in waiting with their chassepots stacked on
each side of the road, but there was no fighting along the Quays.
General Vinoy had established himself in his new Head-Quarters, and the
70,000 or 80,000 men already in the heart of the city are believed to be
quite sufficient to dispose of the last desperadoes of the Commune. The
sounds of battle we heard from more than one point, and yet every one
spoke of the Insurrection as in its last agonies. Men and women once
more held up their heads and snapped their fingers at Delescluze,
Dombrowski, and the Commune, but there was sad evidence all around us of
what this rebellion had done. There in the little cemetery behind the
ramparts lay the unburied and mangled remains of 32 National Guards who
had been killed at the batteries just above. The whole place was a
picture of ruin and desolation. Passing out of the Point du Jour by the
opining where the Porte de St. Cloud had stood, whole and entire, even
after the Prussian bombardment, but where there is not a vestige of it
bigger than a splinter now, I walked along the glacis in the direction
of Auteuil. I was surprised to find that, at a distance of less than an
eighth of a mile from the latter place, the military had fixed their
gabions, sapped right up the glacis, and to within four or five yards of
the fosse. The trenches had been cut across the Bois de Boulogne.
Nothing, however, like enough of the parapet and the earthwork above had
been thrown down to fill up the fosse. Indeed, no effort whatever had
been made in the way of filling up, except at either side of the two
Portes, so that an assault at any other than these points would have
been a very difficult undertaking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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