st then at its
height. What he saw might well confirm him in his resolution to retreat.
There was no longer either a city or a suburb to defend, for both were
heaps of rubbish and cinders. The parapets of the works, dried in the
heats of summer and split in huge fragments by the shot, were crumbling
into the ditches. The interior space was honeycombed with holes made by
the shells. Gabions and sandbags could not be procured to repair the
embrasures, which remained in ruins. Many of the dismounted guns could
no longer be replaced, not because there were not plenty in the
arsenals, but because to mount them by night, under the deadly fire of
the mortars, entailed such frightful sacrifices of men.

The defenders of the works were packed in caves under the parapets; the
gunners lay dead in heaps on the batteries; the wounded could not be
removed by day, because the communications with the rear were now
searched throughout by the fire of the allies, and so lay where they
fell, in torment in the sun beside the more fortunate slain. On landing,
the Prince had passed the hospitals, full to overflowing, and the
ambulances with the wounded crowding what had been the squares. There
was nothing to relieve the horrible monotony of destruction and
devastation except the bridge, which promised retreat from this misery,
and which was approaching completion.

Yet it was after this visit that the Russian General changed his mind in
the direction of what he had before termed folly. "I am resolved," he
wrote to the Minister of War, on September 1st, "to defend the south
side to the last extremity, for it is the only honorable course which
remains to us." Calculating that the daily loss of the garrison was from
eight hundred to nine hundred, and that he could bring twenty-five
thousand men from the army outside to reenforce it, by leaving only
twenty thousand to guard the Mackenzie Heights, he considered he might
still prolong the defence for a month. Everything was against such a
cruel determination; but he proceeded to execute it so far as in him
lay. Yet it did not rest with him to determine the end.

The cannonade once more reduced the Malakoff, its dependencies and
neighbors, to absolute silence, and enabled the French to push their
works yet closer. The soil between the Mamelon and Malakoff could be cut
into like a cheese, and the trenches were more easily made and better
constructed here than elsewhere. The English trenches before