Page:The Rise and Fall on the Paris Commune in 1871.djvu/482

 their inscriptions entirely destroyed, or their monuments much defaced.

Meanwhile, General Ladmirault had continued his movement on La Villette, and taken possession of the Abattoir and the Cattle Market. He then advanced towards the Buttes Chaumont, attacking this position in the rear, and aiding in its capture as already described.

The entire quarter of La Villette at the end of the struggle bore strong evidence of the fury and violence with which it had been conducted. The houses of the boulevard were riddled with bullets and shells from the roof to the ground. The insurgents had not been contented with firing from behind the barricades; it had been necessary to dislodge them from the windows, and nearly every house had become in turn the scene of a violent struggle.

The benches were torn from the sides of the streets; the trees, twisted, broken, and notched, literally covered the ground with their fragments. Broken lamp-posts were strewn around, and the wooden huts erected during the siege to shelter the Mobiles were knocked down, burned, pierced with bullets, or cut in pieces. Most of these shelters were filled with the bodies of the insurgents killed in battle, lying one upon another. The faces smeared with mud and blood, or gashed with horrible wounds, were terrible to look upon. Behind the barricade of the Place de la Rotonde, although the dead had been carried away, their number was proved by the quantities of blood which ran in streams through the gutters. Cannons with broken carriages, guns lying in heaps, and stained with blood, horses stretched dead upon the ground mingled with boxes of preserves and portions of bread—such were the sights which might be seen behind every barricade in the quarter.

In the Rue de Puebla sixty insurgents were killed