The Sun.
London, England, 1871-02-09 00:00:00

BORN.

THE SUN LONDON, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1871.1

presided. Mr. Walter Platt, of Barton Bendish, pro-
posed, and Mr. William Tyson. Amhurst, of Didlington
Hall, seconded the nomination of Mr. George William
Pierrepoint Bentinck. There being no other candidate,
Mr. Bentinck was declared duly elected. In returning
thanks he dwelt upon the urgent need of the defences of
the country being kept in the highest state of efficiency;
and the unfairness of the taxation upon the rural districts.

HORRORS OF THE BOMBARDMENT.

An occassional correspondent of the Daisy News, writ-
from Paris February 6, thus describes some of the scenes
during the bombardment :—They who have not wit-
nessed the numerous phases in the life of a large city
besieged, whose assailants depend more upon famine for
its reduction than upon the assault, can form but the
most slender conception of the scenes of misery
which this metropolis presented after the bombard-
ment began. One of the most heartrending was the
immense number of children's burials; a lh,rge proportion
quite infants. We have not been favoured by our reticent
authorities with any official data relating to the " infant
mortality ;" but our own eyes have convinced us of the
sad fact of its having reached an excessive point. The
majority of these poor little victims literally perished
of starvation ; of disease engendered by the
want of milk. They simply dwindled away, day by day,
until life went out of them. It was a piteous sight to
watch the long piles of tiny coffins being conducted to the
cemeteries. Most of them were mere shells, made of
deal, and roughly nailed together. As a rule, these
burials were not followed by the parents. A man called
a croquemort—gobble-corpse is the nearest translation--
a sort of hybrid between a gravedigger and a
mute, sometimes might be seen trotting along with
two of these little coffins for his load, one under each arm,
in company with another or more of his class, similarly
laden, and making for the graveyard. Usually, four or
more of these shells were placed upon a hand-bier, carried
by two eroquentorts, and were thus conveyed to the same
last resting-place. The people, who pay great out-
ward respect to the dead, uncovered, looked sadly at
the mournful spectacle, and passed on. I have heard
many mutter, " Pauvres petits I" Although no class
was exempt from privation and suffering, the poorest
neighbourhoods were necessarily most tried, and
some of these were just the ones which were
so cruelly bombarded. Entire families were
huddled together in cellars, to escape from death.
To sleep here was bad enough ; but to inhabit
these holes the day through, and day after day, required
a heroic power of endurance. Then the daily pittance of
bread had to be sought, and the infinitesimal portion of
meat. For hours, standing in the mud, in the rain, in
the snow, in the frost, had the poor women to wait their
turn at the butcher's or the baker's, in actual peril of
their lives ; for the Prussian shells fell everywhere,
and numbers of women were killed and wounded whose
immediate errand was to procure food for their children.
Then, the food obtained, it must be dressed. To accomplish
this all sorts of contrivances had to be resorted to ; first,
to rig up a cooking-place within the four walls of
the cellar ; not so easy a task when the avoidance of
smoke had to be taken into account as an elementary
principle of the arrangement. Those whose cellars had
an opening into the street or the courtyard of the house
managed pretty well, by carrying the smoke stack of a
stove throughthe aperture, but the occupants of cellars un-
provided with the means of obtaining air and light were
obliged to submit to the alternative of dispensing with fire,
or incurring the risk of asphyxia. Maladies of various
kinds, fever and smallpox especially, also aggravated the
miseries of this horrible position, and literally decimated
this unfortunate class of the population. Upon the women
the chief burden of all these trials fell ; and I believe they
would have continued to bear them for a greatly
prolonged period, with the hope of ultimate deliverance
to sustain them. I feel it a duty to speak of the female
population of Paris in the highest terms, as deserving
well of their country, and quite as much as the soldiers
and citizens who have died or exposed their lives on the
field of battle.