The Sun.
London, England, 1870-11-01 00:00:00

THE SIEGE OF PARIS.

' The special correspondent of the Telegraph,writing from
the head quarters of the Prussian army, Versailles, on the
22nd, says :—The Prussian siege guns preserve the
r•minous and menacing silence which, I cannot but think,
must oppress the Parisians with a sense of mysterious
danger of unknown, incalculable calamity, always
imminent, and only deferred in its deadly
action by the inscrutable will of their stern
foes. To all the puerile sputtering of the
French works—whose 'occupants think nothin.; of
pitching a dozen shells at a single horseman, or blowing
twenty thousand francs into space on the chance of dis-
abling a sentry or scattering a sergeant's guard—not a
single German piece designs to growl out a warning reply.
We do not waste ammunition on this side of
the war in the hottest actions the Germans are seldom
to be found firing away their cartridges in vain ; and
charges that cost from 3s. 6d. upwards are not things
to be squandered idly in trying to knock over a few
paltry hun►an nine-plus a✓ long ranges. Every
says the proverb, has its billet ; it is one of
the chief objects inculcated in the science of war, as
taught to German soldiers under Prussian auspices, that
the billet should be as harmful as possible to the enemy.
To the Frenchman, with his guns as with his tonguq,
it is an absolute necessity that he should constantly

make himself heard, loudly and obtrusively ; the German
has the faculty of remaining silent contentedly and with-
out an effort ; but his silence is, as a rule, more significant
than the Frenchman's clamour. Every harmless but
costly salvo discharged from the forts is a positive loss to
the French nation, and a negative gain to the German
armies. The latter will not open fire till the Ist of No-
vember, if then—which I am inclined to doubt, although
that date is mentioned confidently by the scientific officers
as that on which the spell of dumbness laid upon their
guns will be broken ; but, when they do opsn, it will be
on a scale so terrible, with a vigour so irresistible, that
he French works will crumble away under the hail of
shells. So soon as Forts Issy, Vanves, and Montrouge
shall have been annihilated, the bombardment of Paris
will commence; and it wil depend upon the citizen
hosts under Trochu whether it be arrested . ere irre-
parable damage should have been inflicted upon the
city, or continued until Paris shall be little more
than ki huge aggregation of scorched and burning
ruins. Once commenced, the dreadful work of
destruction - will be carried on without cease
oz intermission death will, indeed, beat with
most impartial foot the house doors of poor and rich,
proletarian and noble. Meanwhile, as a great German
has phrased it, cruelly but aptly, " the Parisians will
stew in their own juice ;" and the. miseries of the second
European metropolis will augment daily until they
attain simply unendurable intensity. As it is, hun-
dreds of people daily sally forth from the gates at the
risk of their lives, to dig up potatoes from the fields be-
tween and even before the forts, which make a show of
covering them by a heavy fire. To-day, two or three
thousand came out with carts rount Fort Mont Valerien,
in quest of vegetable sustenance ; and at ono time, the
outpost firing becoming rather lively, the marauders got
such a fright that they fled back cn masse, leaving their
rolling stock and booty behinci them. Hunger cannot be
far off when men and women will imperil their existences
to secure a few sacks of potatoes and a slender stock of
green meat. A month may elapse ere Paris can
be
,taken ; but one scarcely dares to picture to
himself the sufferings that its inhabitants will endure
throughout the interim. The gloomiest phase of the war
has set in ; henceforth each chapter in the tale of horrors
yet to be told will be filled with revelations more andmore
awful, as the final catastrophe approaches.

The hfanchester Examiner innocently prints the follow-
ing laughable telegram from its corrospondeut at Berlin :
" On Monday, the German troops before Paris will hold a
grand religious service, and on Tuesday the bombardment
will commence."

According to German accounts great distress prevails
amongst the poor people of Paris. Near Arceuil several
hundred women rushed, as if they were starving, into the
potato fields, and, throwing themselves down upon the
ground, with their fingers eagerly dug up the potatoes.
Upon receiving tho orders of the officer commanding the
outpost party to return at once within the walls of the
town, or if not they would be fired upon, they made the
reply—" We cannot suffer more nor fare worse than we
are doing at Paris in the present moment even should we
be fired at, and we should, in the latter case, rid our-
selves sooner of the wretched lives that we are now forced
to lead."