Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/170

 The fighting was commenced at five o'clock on the morning of the 19th, with great obstinacy. From that hour there was a constant roar of cannon, musketry and mitrailleuses all along the line, from the extreme left to the extreme right. Shells flew through the sky over the doomed quarters to the west of Paris, shrieking like birds of ill-omen, and they fell in scores about the Ternes and the Champ Elysées. Clichy and the northern parts of Levallois were, however, the objective points, and the damage was severe at the right side of the bridge of Asnières, and all about the space between the Versailles railway and the Avenue de Clichy. The insurgents suffered very heavily, for they had a habit of clustering together behind walls, and under what they considered to be the protection of street corners, the consequence of which was, when a shell burst near them it did fearful execution. The heavy fire of musketry was due chiefly to men stationed in the houses and on the house-tops. The walls of every dwelling from whence the bridge and the railway could be commanded were loop-holed with utter disregard to the rights of property; and mattresses, pillows, and even feather beds stuffed into the windows to do duty as sand-bags. The insurgents thus intrenched, and further protected by a strong barricade, kept up an incessant musketry fire on Asnières, and the guns at the Porte d'Asnières and the Porte Bineau were each firing in the direction in which the enemy was supposed to be. Of course the shells and bullets must fall somewhere, but as the position of the regular troops was very imperfectly known, and those few that were known could be seen from the walls, the execution they did among the Versailles troops was not very formidable. On the other hand the insurgents occupied a narrow zone outside the walls, and did not even occupy the banks of the river, so that the fierce shelling to which their positions were subjected did great havoc in