The Sun.
London, England, 1871-01-04 00:00:00

SHELLING THE FORTS.

Writing from the Headquarters of the Crown Prince ofJ.
Prussia, Versailles, December 31, the special correspon;
de of the Daily News says :—The yea of the great vie-
s is passing away without any sign that the great.
siege is soon to end. We have had the cannonade of
the besiegers against Avron, to the east of Paris, and
the sortie of that besieged a week earlier from their
northern outwoiks. We have had constant watch-
fulness to the southward and westward of the city,
where the frozen state of the Seine was thought to
favour General Trochu. But Paris has not been shelled,
and the final effort of the garrison has seemingly not been
made. There is now no chance but that New Year's
Day will find the French capital under French
colours, and that the surrender or the rescue will
occur in 1871. It has caused some uneasiness in Ger-
many that this affair of Paris should have
dragged on from month to month, and many Germans
have expressed impatience to see it finished. The
very fact of their own successes in August and Sep-
tember has made the comparative quiet of the following
months seem like ill-success to over-zealous patriots. Yet,
after all, what a task it is which Germany has accom-
plished ! To shut off the enemy's capital from the outer
world, to seize supplies of food and forage in the
heart of a hostile country, and to repulse the
attempts of the enemy's troops to get near their
blockaded Government, are feats of no common
kind. The old year passes away before
Paris has been starved into * submission. Round
the city, for miles and miles, are those well-ordered lines
of baggage waggons, drawn up in the fields near the vil-
lages, those neatly-equipped field-batteries waiting to
mow down the luckless " ivlohlots " who may venture
forth, and those villages themselves crammed with mili-
tary guests. I say nothing of the careful preparation of
the earthworks which threaten 'Paris. It is not for
want of active engineers that no bombardment
has been tried—nor do I touch on the gigantic labour of
feeding, clothing, and nursing in sickness, this armed
multitude round the city. The great point of the Ger-
man task is its result, is the shutting in of Paris, and the

"bluffing off "of France. There may yet be hard fight-
ing and long delay, for the Prussians seem to be strung up
to the pitch of an obstinate defence ; but 1871 will find
the grip of the invader on the throat of his foe like a
blacksmith s vice. The bitter cold weather
of the past week will seo out the old year
as surely as the French resistance. Everything
is still covered with crisp snow, and the soldiers have to
creep into the holes and corners of half-ruined
houses to shelter themselves on outpost duty,
and fuel is scarce, and the peasantry are suffering
much. It is a sad winter time for thousands
of French people who are beyond the immediate
dangers of the siege, and away from the alarms of the
warfare in the North and on the Loire. Nor is it a very
cheerful thing for the victors to remain so long away
from home. I see no symptoms of discouragement in a
military sense, no symptom of less readiness to fight,
among the troops round Paris ; but they are
tired of waiting, eager to have done the work and to reap
the fruit of their past hardships.