begin again, or as if they preferred looking at their conquerors from the windows before trusting themselves to a nearer acquaintance. They had been living for six weeks in cellars and other underground localities, and could not at once realize that their dreaded enemies might now be safely met. By degrees they emerged from their retreats. The manure and mattresses with which the cellar windows had been protected against bullets were removed; the doors of the subterranean abodes were thrown open to admit light and air, and one by one, pale men and women, sickly by confinement, crept up into the sunshine they had missed for weeks; children, timid and emaciated, slowly came out into the open air, to be rewarded for their temerity by the sight of fresh uniforms and the sound of military music. Many afflicted parents went to the spot in the courtyard, where, in default of a more sacred resting-place, one of their beloved ones had been laid during the siege; the way to the cemetery, which was at some distance, having been too dangerous to admit of burial there. Having ventured so far, people, or, at any rate, as many as had their houses left standing, went up stairs to enjoy the long missed luxury of a room, and the everyday comforts it brings with it. At last, after the Germans had been in the town for hours, people came abroad to acquaint themselves with the new order of things, and to visit the relations and friends from whom they had been separated while cannon balls were flying about. What joyful embracings when those they sought were found alive! What pangs when they were found to have died a premature and violent death!

With one exception the inhabitants treated their conquerors with great consideration. On the evening of the 28th a Baden soldier was shot in a by-street near the cathedral, and another wounded. The assassin fled, but was captured by several citizens, and immediately shot by the German soldiers. As soon as General Werder heard the tidings, he ordered the city to pay a heavy contribution, and threatened to humiliate the inhabitants by making a triumphal entry into the town with his whole army. But being ultimately convinced that the act was entirely attributable to isolated ruffians, he cancelled the orders, and relieved the city from the onerous contribution of four millions of francs. The next day the Prussian commandant issued the following notice:

"The state of siege still continues. Crimes and offences will be punished by martial law. All weapons are immediately to be given up. All newspapers and publications are forbidden till further orders. Public houses to be closed at 9 p.m.; after that hour every civilian must carry a 9 p.m.; after that hour lantern. The municipal authorities have to provide quarters, without food, for all good men. "MERTENS."

No salute was fired when Strassburg fell. The 28th and 29th of September passed without any signs of rejoicing; and it was not till the 30th— the same day on which, 189 years before, Louis XIV. by fraud and treachery became master of the town-that the joy of the Germans at regaining possession of a place which they looked upon as their indisputable property, was expressed in the form of thanksgiving; a Protestant service being performed on one side of the Orangerie Gardens, a Catholic service on the other. The officiating pastor in the Prussian religious camp was the chaplain of the 34th regiment. The troops were formed into a hollow square, in the middle of which stood a group of officers. The chaplain took his place on one side of the square, beside an improvised altar composed of drums built up against a tree, and nothing could be more simple or impressive than the whole service. He took for his text the opening verses of the 105th Psalm, and gave thanks to God for the recovery of Strassburg from the hands of the foreigner and its restoration to the German race, from whom, for nearly two centuries, it had been unjustly kept. The 30th of September, instead of being associated with the loss of Strassburg, would now, he said, be regarded as the happiest day in its history, the second birthday of the ancient German city.

After the services in the Orangerie a thanksgiving was celebrated in the Protestant church of St. Thomas, at which General von Werder and his staff were present. The general was received at the door by the clergy. The principal pastor delivered an address, in which he assured General von Werder that the "immense majority" of the population of Strassburg were German in feeling. There is no doubt that the Protestants of the city were well disposed towards Germany, and this, perhaps, the speaker chiefly meant. It is possible that General Werder, remembering the desperate

shells which he had lately been throwing into their houses, may have doubted the accuracy of the statement that the "immense majority" were glad to see him. Be that as it may, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on those of the much-protesting pastor, held him all the time, as if affectionately, by the hand, and having heard him to the close, without altering his gaze or relaxing his grasp, replied. His answer, simple enough in itself, was delivered very impressively, and had a great effect on all who heard it. Still standing on the threshhold, he said: "I am obliged to you for the manner in which you receive me. One thing ought to reassure you my first visit in Strassburg is to the church. I am pained at the manner in which I have been forced to enter this German city; and, believe me, I shall do my utmost to heal its wounds. From my soldiers you have nothing whatever to fear. Their order and discipline are perfect; but do not forget that the same order will be expected and required on the part of the civil population. Once more I thank you for your expressions of good-will."

The service then began. The body of the church was full of troops, the general and his staff occupying seats in front of the pulpit. The sermon was preached by Emil Frommel, royal garrison chaplain of Berlin, and field-division chaplain of the guard landwehr division. The discourse was founded on 1 Samuel vii. 12, and was a fair sample of the military field preaching in the German armies. Pitched in the key of exultation which at the time found an echo in all German hearts and households, it had the ring of the song of Deborah and of Barak, or of those drumhead discourses to which Cromwell's grim Ironsides listened after Marston Moor and Dunbar.

The redoubts and other fortifications constructed by the besieged, as they appeared on the day after the surrender of Strassburg, betrayed the tremendous effects of the German artillery fire. The parapets and epaulements were knocked into hopeless masses of loose earth. Most of the embrasures had been closed with sand-bags; and the earthen tops of the stone-Luilt magazines, in some cases forming the epaulements, had sandbags added to preserve them, and to aid their power of arresting the flanking fire of the besiegers. The fire from the Prussian batteries was so well directed that most of the shells struck the top of

moment, sent destruction to the men and guns underneath. There was not a gun but bore evidence that the flying fragments of shell had left their mark. Many of the guns were knocked over; wheels and carriages were smashed beyond repair; broken guns and fragments of carriages lay in and behind the batteries. In the two principal redoubts attacked, the appearances tended to indicate that the guns had not been replaced for some time, and that the garrison had ceased also to repair the embrasures and parapets.

Amongst the private property of the town nothing was more striking in the ravages of the bombardment than its searching character. It was a fiery furnace, under the scorching flames of which all constructive shams and artifices perished. No traces were left of paper-hanging, cornices, mouldings, or ornamentation; the walls, after the ordeal, wore an aspect not far different from that they would exhibit if left to bleach in the rain and sunshine of centuries. The suburbs immediately exposed to the German fire were literally a heap of ruins, scarcely a house being left standing.

The devastation was greatest in the Jews' quarter, the fishermen's quarter, St. Nicholas, Finkenmatt, Broglie, and the neighbourhood of the Stein Strasse all of them wearing exactly the aspect of the exhumed remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum. In the town itself nearly all the principal buildings were reduced to ashes. The prefecture, the Protestant church, the theatre, the museum, the artillery school, infantry barracks, military magazine, railway station, and, worst of all, the library, with its invaluable contents, were entirely destroyed. In the immediate neighbourhood of the public buildings many inhabited houses escaped with comparatively little damage; the reason assigned being that, in the public buildings, there was no one at hand to extinguish the first flames, and when these were seen ascending into the air, they served as a mark for the enemy's guns. At night (and the severe bombardments were always at night) flames made a tempting target for the besiegers. The hotel de la Ville de Paris received forty shells during the siege, but engines and water-buckets were kept in readiness on all the floors, and fires in this building were no sooner kindled than they were extinguished.

The numerous handsome bridges which spanned the canal existed so far as their roadways were concerned, but scarcely a vestige of parapet remained, while the canal itself was almost choked —quite choked towards its southern extremity with barges and boats of every kind smashed and sunken with everything they contained.

All that remained of the citadel, at one time deemed by its possessors almost impregnable, was huge masses of rubbish produced by the incessant fire from the batteries of Kehl on the one side, and the bombs thrown from those near Schiltigheim on the other.

One of the first acts of Lous XIV. on taking the city in 1681, was to dislodge the Protestants from the cathedral, which they had occupied from the period of the Reformation. The Dominican church, which had long been secularized, was allotted to them instead, and had its name changed to that of the Temple Neuf. It had one of the most famous organs of Silbermann. In the choir, divided from the nave, was lodged the special glory of Alsace-its library, the finest on the Rhine, in which the archives, antiquities, topography, and early printing collections were treasured. All perished. Since the apocryphal burning of the library of Alexandria, perhaps no equally irreparable loss has occurred. Unfortunately no catalogue of its many treasures exists. An elaborate one in MS. had been prepared by the librarian, but that also perished. A very fine work, the "Alsace Antiquary," perished among them-sixteen folio vols. of MS. upon Strassburg. Greatest loss of all was that of the most precious record connected with the discovery of printingthe documents of the legal process instituted by Gutenberg against the heirs of his partner Dreisehn, to establish his right as the inventor of typography. Among the early specimens of typography there was a copy of the first German Bible, printed by Mentelin about 1466, but undated; also three early Latin Bibles by Mentelin, Jenson, and Eggestein, the last bearing the manuscript date 1468. There was, besides, a rare copy of Virgil by Mentelin, a still rarer Commentary of Servius upon that poet, printed by the celebrated Valdarfer; a Jerome's "Epistles," by Schoeffer, 1470; and about 4000 other books printed before the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The inner part of the town, although it escaped the measure of devastation inflicted upon the

fringe of suburbs and outer circle of buildings adjoining them, but belonging properly to the city within the Ill, suffered heavily. The stately picture gallery in the Klèberplatz was gutted from basement to roof; the archiepiscopal and imperial palaces, as well as other fine mansions near the minster, were much damaged; and bridges over the canals were entirely smashed, and the houses in the Quai des Bateliers, Quai des Pêcheurs, Place de Broglie, &c., were all greatly injured. The cathedral was to all external appearance uninjured. The spire, though it had been struck in more places than one, was as attractive a spectacle as ever. The cross on its summit appeared to have been touched by a projectile, as it leaned to one side. Some of the ornamental work had been carried away, and a portion of the stone stair in one of the side towers destroyed. The outer roof of the nave had been burned, and the windows here and there pierced with balls; but the famous clock escaped, and the cathedral was on the whole in excellent condition, owing to the orders of the Prussian commander, who would not permit a single bullet to be fired against it, except at the commencement of the siege, when the French used it as an observatory. In the promenade, where the bands were wont in times of peace to play of afternoons, trees and lamp-posts were lying about amongst Louis Quatorze chairs and all sorts of old fashioned furniture saved from burning houses; whilst even the little orchestra, struck by a shell, was partly smashed and partly burnt. No less than 448 private houses were entirely destroyed, and out of the 5150 in the town and suburbs nearly 3000 were more or less injured; 1700 civilians were killed or wounded, and 10,000 persons made houseless. The estimate of the total damage to the city was nearly £8,000,000.

Immediately after the capitulation, subscriptions were opened in Berlin and Frankfort to relieve the suffering Strassburgers, and restore the town; but towards the latter object little was raised, as the magnitude of the ruins seemed to render the efforts of private charity utterly inadequate.

In the narrow space of the botanic gardens, hardly exceeding an acre, the anguish of the siege was epitomized. At its commencement the city had three cemeteries, one of which was occupied for its defence; another was overflowed; the third was in the hands of the enemy, whose parallels

were driven through it. As the only space available, the botanic garden, adjoining the arsenal and citadel, was turned into a burying-ground. After the siege it wore, as did, in fact, all the gardenground for miles round, the aspect of a neglected overgrown wilderness. Along its eastern side a trench, much deeper and broader than that of the parallel, had been driven in two rows; and in piles, four and five above each other, the dead of the last six weeks had there been crowded. In this dense mass of mortality it was painful to witness the anxiety displayed by survivors not to lose sight of the remains of their relatives. Wooden crosses, with brief inscriptions, immortelles, bead wreaths, statuary, floral bouquets, crowded each other.

The open town of Kehl, opposite Strassburg, met with an even worse fate than the latter. It was bombarded early in the siege of Strassburg, an act considered by the Germans a piece of wanton and unjustifiable destruction, as its utter uselessness was apparent. By reducing Kehl to ashes the French did not retard by one day the progress of the besiegers, nor cripple them in the slightest degree. The batteries on either side of the town were as effective, after the inhabitants had been driven forth by showers of shells from their burning houses, as they were before. Pitiable as the destruction in Strassburg appeared, the streets and dwellings of Kehl presented a spectacle even more saddening. Not above five houses remained intact; and the only object which indicated that the ruins in the main street had once been habitable dwellings was a porcelain stove, standing erect amid the heaps of charred rubbish.

The catalogue of the guns employed and the shot fired in the siege of Strassburg deserves to be mentioned. There were 241 pieces placed in battery outside the walls. During the thirty-one days over which the regular operations extended these fired 193,722 rounds, or, on an average, 6249 per day, 269 per hour, or between four and five per minute. Of the total of the rounds, 45,000 shells were fired from the rifled 12-pounders, 28,000 shells from the long rifled 24-pounders; 23,000 7-pound bombs, 20,000 25-pound bombs, and 15,000 50-pound bombs from smooth-bore mortars; 11,000 shrapnels from the rifled 12pounders, 8000 shells from the rifled 6-pounders, 5000 shrapnels from the rifled 24-pounders, 4000 shrapnels from the rifled 6-pounders, 3000

long shells from the 15 centimètre guns, and 600 long shells from the 21 centimètre guns.

A valuable prize fell into the hands of Germany through the surrender of Strassburg. No fewer than 2000 cannon were found in the fortifications, arsenal, and foundry: 1200 of them were bronze guns of various calibre, mostly rifled, and the large majority new, having been made in 1862, 1863, and 1864, and never fired; 800 were iron, some of them very large, smooth-bored and rifled. One hundred and fifty tons of powder made up in cartridges, and four hundred and fifty tons in bulk, were discovered in store; besides many thousand stand of arms, including hosts of excellent Chassepots, although the mobiles and sédentaires were armed only with "tabatières." Clothing also was found, enough for a very large body of men. The military authorities estimated the value of the matériel, which by the capitulation legitimately became the property of Germany, at more than two millions and a half sterling. In hard cash they took 10,000,000 of francs (£400,000) deposited in the military chest of the garrison.

Subsequently a commission was appointed by the Tours delegate government to investigate the reasons for the surrender of Strassburg. It is needless to say that no imputation on the courage and patriotism of its defenders could be for a moment sustained.

The fortress, which was not taken either in 1814 or in 1815, made on this occasion a most heroic defence against an overwhelming force, furnished with tremendous artillery; and it is hard to say whether the inhabitants or the garrison should be held as entitled to most praise. The endurance of the citizens was certainly not less conspicuous than the bravery of the troops; and perhaps the truest symptom of patriotic feeling which the French nation showed during the days of adversity in the late war, was exhibited in the hearty loyalty with which the Parisians laid their laurel wreaths at the base of the civic statue of Strassburg. General Uhrich undoubtedly "made himself an everlasting name" by his defence of the Alsatian city, which will be narrated by Frenchmen in future generations as one of the few bright spots in a singularly gloomy period of the national history.

The siege of Toul is chiefly remarkable for the bravery and endurance with which its small garrison held out for six weeks against a force of 20,000 Prussians under the duke of Mecklenburg,

and thus deprived the German armies during that time of the advantage of direct railway communication from the Rhine at Coblentz and Mayence via Nancy to Paris. The town lies in the valley of the Moselle, and its stout and prolonged resistance has led many to suppose that it occupied an elevated position. On the contrary, it stands in a sort of basin formed by an abrupt curve of the Moselle, and may be said to be completely commanded by the surrounding heights, inasmuch as the two hills St. Michel and St. Maurice overlook it at a distance of about 4000 yards. It is regularly fortified on Vauban's system; and has excellent walls, six bastions, and deep fosses filled with water. It was formerly deemed a very strong fortress; but as it possessed no outworks or detached forts, it proved to be untenable for any lengthened period before new long-range siege artillery. The most conspicuous object seen on approaching the town is the fine old cathedral, one of the most famous Gothic edifices of the sixteenth century. Orders were given by the German commander to spare it as much as possible; but injuries to the external walls were unavoidable, and a large window was destroyed. The public building that suffered most severely by the bombardment was the stately residence of the mayor, which was pierced in every part. It seems, however, that for five weeks the besiegers had only ordinary field-guns in use, against which the fortress held out stoutly, and had evidently no intention to give in. It capitulated only when the regular siege artillery of the Germans, heavy rifled breechloaders, came up. On the 20th, the besiegers advanced a battery within range of the bastions, and some well-directed rounds drove the French from the walls, whence they had kept up a vigorous musketry-fire. Six Bavarian batteries planted on the heights made terrible havoc, 2000 bombs and grenades being fired daily at the fortress. By the fearful bombardBy the fearful bombardment of the 22nd and 23rd September, when the town was on fire in twenty-three places at once, whole streets were destroyed, and the barracks, hospital, and chapel, situate on the plateau of the rock forming the fortress, became a heap of ruins. As the German armies around Paris were suffering serious inconvenience from the railway being held by Toul, the grand-duke had determined to storm the place. Before, however, the siege had been begun in earnest, and the first parallel dug out, on the 23rd September, while the bombardment was proceeding

VOL. II.

on all sides, suddenly a large white flag was exhibited from the Cathedral tower. All the batteries at the grand-duke's command were immediately silent, and a Prussian parlementaire rode into the town, who soon returned with the commandant of Toul, Colonel Hück. After long negotiations, the capitulation was agreed to; and as darkness had meanwhile set in, the commandant and the chief of the grand-duke's staff appended their signatures by the dim light of a stable lantern. The entire garrison of about 2500, including 500 infantry and artillerymen, the others being mobile guards, surrendered as prisoners of war. The terms of the capitulation were that the fortress, war material, and soldiers should be given up, with the exception of those mobile and national guards who were inhabitants of the place prior to the outbreak of the war. In consideration of the gallant defence of the fortress, all officers and officials having the rank of officers, who gave their word of honour in writing not to bear arms against Germany, nor to act contrary to her interests in any other way, had their liberty, and were allowed to retain their swords, horses, and other property. An inventory of the war material, consisting of eagles, guns, swords, horses, war chests, and articles of military equipment, was to be given to the Prussians. The convention thus far was similar to that of Sedan; but there was another article which said:—“ In view of the lamentable accident which occurred on the occasion of the capitulation of Laon, it is agreed that if a similar thing should happen on the entry of the German troops into the fortress of Toul, the entire garrison shall be at the mercy of the grandduke of Mecklenburg."

Some eighty officers, including all those belonging to the mobile guards, chose to give their parole and remain in France. Seventeen superior officers, including Commandant Hück, who was complimented on his bravery by the grand-duke, preferred Prussian captivity. The reasons given by the commandant for capitulating were, that he had only ammunition for three or four days, when he would have been forced to surrender, after all Toul had possibly been destroyed; and that the mobile guards were undisciplined and not suf ficiently practised in arms to offer a long defence or to repulse a storming attack. The same evening the French garrison marched out and bivouacked in a meadow under guard. The next day they were sent by railway to Prussia, and the

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