War. "Room for the people, for the bare-armed fighting
men. The hour of the revolutionary war has struck." This was the placard
posted throughout Paris on the 22nd, by order of the Communist chief,
Delescluze. And again, "After the barricades, our houses; after our
houses, our ruins." Preparations were made to burn down a part of
Central Paris to delay the progress of the Versaillese. Rumour magnified
this into a plan of wholesale incendiarism, and wild stories were told
of _petroleuses_ flinging oil over buildings, and of Communist firemen
ready to pump petroleum. A squad of infuriated "Reds" rushed off and
massacred the Archbishop of Paris and six other hostages, while
elsewhere Dominican friars, captured regulars, and police agents fell
victims to the rage of the worsted party.

Madness seemed to have seized on the women of Paris. Even when the men
were driven from barricades by weight of numbers or by the capture of
houses on their flank, these creatures fought on with the fury of
despair till they met the death which the enraged linesmen dealt out to
all who fought, or seemed to have fought. Simpson, the British war
correspondent, tells how he saw a brutal officer tear the red cross off
the arm of a nurse who tended the Communist wounded, so that she might
be done to death as a fighter[62]. Both sides, in truth, were maddened
by the long and murderous struggle, which showed once again that no
strife is so horrible as that of civil war. On Sunday, May 28, the last
desperate band was cut down at the Cemetery Pere-Lachaise, and fighting
gave way to fusillades. Most of the chiefs perished without the pretence
of trial, and the same fate befel thousands of National Guards, who were
mown down in swathes and cast into trenches. In the last day of
fighting, and the horrible time that followed, 17,000 Parisians are said
to have perished[63]. Little by little, law reasserted her sway, but
only to doom 9600 persons to heavy punishment. Not until 1879 did
feelings of mercy prevail, and then, owing to Gambetta's powerful
pleading, an amnesty was passed for the surviving Communist prisoners.

[Footnote 62: _The Autobiography of William Simpson_ (London, 1903), p.
261.]

[Footnote 63: G. Hanotaux, _Contemporary France_, p. 225. For further
details see Lissagaray's _History of the Commune_; also personal details
in Washburne's _Recollections of a Minister to France_, 1869-1877, vol.
ii. chaps, ii.-vii.]

The Paris Commune affo