This startling news meant that Paris was ready to surrender. How many hearts were lighter in both camps next day! War is not all glory and heroic achievement. Those who know what war is pray to God that statesmen and nations may think twice before they rush into so terrible a calamity. In this war of 180 days the Germans had won fifteen great victories, captured twenty-six fortresses, and made 363,000 prisoners. “Paris is utterly cowed, fairly beaten”--so they said who came from Paris to the German lines, and a few non-combatants, journalists, and philanthropists, ventured to enter the city before the German troops passed in on the 1st of March. They found the streets crowded with men in uniform. The food shops had nothing to sell. There were a few sickly preserves, nothing solid worth eating--some horses’ fat for a delicacy to help down the stuff they called bread. A fowl was priced at forty-five francs; stickleback were fourteen francs a pound; butter, forty francs a pound. Outside the bakers’ shops stood a shivering line of ladies and women, waiting their turn for loaves that tasted like putty, and pulled to pieces like chopped straw. But there were in side streets many of the roughest, the most cowardly and cruel ruffians of the worst parts of Paris. They were on the prowl, waiting for their prey; so no wonder that Mr. Archibald Forbes, journalist, and several others in divers parts of the city had unpleasant experiences. Forbes tells us he was walking down the Champs Elysées when he met the Crown Prince of Saxony with his staff riding by. Forbes raised his hat; the Prince returned the salute and passed on. But the dirty _gamins_ of Paris had been looking on. They hustled the Englishman, called him _mouchard_ (spy), _sacré Prussien_, _cochon_, tripped him up, hit him on the back of the head with a stick; then, when he was down, they jumped on his stomach with their sabots or wooden shoes. He struggled, as a Scotsman can, got up, hit out right and left; but numbers prevailed, and he was dragged by the legs on his back, with many bumps and bruises, to the police-station. There he showed his papers, and the Prefect released him in a humour that said, “I am mighty glad you Parisians have had a good thrashing.” Another journalist--so he told me in London a few weeks later--also had ventured to stray away from the German sentries in order to see what Paris thought of a siege. He soon found himself the centre of an angry throng. Some cried: “He is a _sacré Prussien_! See his yellow hair!” “No; I am an English artist,” shouted my friend, still smiling. “He is a confounded spy! Take him to the Seine! duck him in the river!”