Balan tottered a mass of
ruins.

The cannonade still shook the hills to the south in spite of the
white flag on the citadel. There were white flags, too, on the
ramparts, on the Port des Capucins, and at the Gate of Paris. An
officer, followed by a lancer, who carried a white pennon on his
lance-point, entered the street from the north. A dozen soldiers
and officers hacked it off with their sabres, crying, "No
surrender! no surrender!" Shells continued to fall into the
packed streets, blowing horrible gaps in the masses of struggling
men. The sun set in a crimson blaze, reflecting on window and
roof and the bloody waters of the river. When at last it sank
behind the smoky hills, the blackness in the city was lighted by
lurid flames from burning houses and the swift crimson glare of
Prussian shells, still plunging into the town. Through the crash
of crumbling walls, the hiss and explosion of falling shells, the
awful clamour and din in the streets, the town clock struck
solemnly six times. As if at a signal the firing died away; a
desolate silence fell over the city--a silence full of rumours,
of strange movements--a stillness pulsating with the death gasps
of a nation.

Out on the heights of La Moncelle, of Daigny, and Givonne
lanterns glimmered where the good Sisters of Mercy and the
ambulance corps passed among the dead and dying--the thirty-five
thousand dead and dying! The plateau of Illy, where the cavalry
had charged again and again, was twinkling with thousands of
lanterns; on the heights of Frenois Prussian torches swung,
signalling victory.

But the spectacle in the interior of the town--a town of nineteen
thousand people, into which now were crushed seventy thousand
frantic soldiers, was dreadful beyond description. Horror
multiplied on horror. The two bridges and the streets were so
jammed with horses and artillery trains that it seemed impossible
for any human being to move another inch. In the glare of the
flames from the houses on fire, in the middle of the smoke,
horses, cannon, fourgons, charrettes, ambulances, piles of dead
and dying, formed a sickening pell-mell. In this chaos starving
soldiers, holding lighted lanterns, tore strips of flesh from
dead horses lying in the mud, killed by the shells. Arms, broken
and foul with blood and mud--rifles, pistols, sabres, lances,
casques, mitrailleuses--covered the pavements.

The gates of the town were closed; the water in the fortification
moats ref