The Sun.
London, England, 1870-10-12 00:00:00

BOMBARDMENT BEFORE THE SORTIE.

The special correspondent of the Daily News at
Noisseville, by Metz, writes on the 4th :—Up in
the front here we get to look upon the
fortresses environing the town of Metz much
as the Naples people regard and talk of Mount Ve-
suvius when that mountain is in an uneasy condi-
tion. For a whole day St. Julien has been quiet.
St. Quentin has not omitted a single puff of smoke,
and Des Bottes might have been a flower garden
tended by pretty girls. This at least was the case
up till eleven o'clock this forenoon, and the martial popu
lation of Noisseville were taking it as easy as discipline
will permit on the foreposts. go the left of the Brasserie,
a post I have already named, lying on the chaussee and
parallel to Noisseville on the south, a large body cf
Prussian troops were engaged in constructing large wooden
barracks just in rear of the entrenchment line. These
are being built for the accommodation of the troops
who now occupy the Brasserie, which has been
reduced to ruins by the many bombardments
which it has undergone. The French in Des Bottes
could see the progress of this work and the number of
he men engaged in it ; and the idea seemed to strike
them that it might not be out of place to attempt to
interrupt the building operations. Anyhow, they com-
menced rather a fierce shell fire on the unfinished barracks,
and also on the unfortunate Brasserie, under the shelter
of which the working party was withdrawn when the
first gFenade came hurtling over the trees. The
Brasserie must by this time be thoroughly well
used to these pleasant visitors, and there is this
consolation for it, that if it were explo Jed bodily it
could not be ruined much more utterly than now. All
that it is good for is that the heap of stones which once
composed a rather imposing structure should afford
shelter for troops drawn up in the rear. But even this
office the Brasserie is now incapable of performing. The
shells send its loose stones flying in all directions, and it
was thus that several men were wounded yesterday
morning. The contagion of firing was communicated
by Des Bottes to the foreposts. These began blazing
away at each other in a very level fashion,
the Prussians replying to the French fire with
the Chassepots, the use of which they have
been practising so sedulously for the last few days.
Everybody has got so much used to this intermittent
outpost fire that the only notice it met with was a
whistle occasionally from some soldier moving about
our village when a bullet whistled past him, or hit the
wall a yard or two above his head. From firing at the
wooden barracks and the Brasserie, Des Bottes
took it into his head to chuck a few shells at
Servigny, the village to our right, and then St.
Julien chimed in with his great cannon-balls.
Noisseville occupied an intermediate position between the
Brasserie and Servigny, but up till about one o'clock it
had unaccountably escaped the polite attentions of the
two French forts. About that hour, however, a great
cannon-ball came whistling across from St. Julien, crashed
through the wall of a house in which most of the officers
were quartered, and tumbled in among the stacked arms
in an open space in the street, making a hole in which
a horse might have been buried. Nobody wad
hurt, but the paymaster was nearly smothered
with the debris which fell from the wall through
which the great ball passed. Des Bottes followed
St. Julien's example in firing into Noisseville, the latter
projecting 421 b and 641 b shells, the former confining him-
self to cannon-balls. It was a great waste of powder and
shot. Nobody was hurt, and all the effect was that a
village already for the most part burnt and in ruins, was
destroyed a little more. The church was terribly wrecked
by the cannon of St. Julien. Already the
exterior had been knocked out of shape, but
the inside retained much of its original in-
tegrity. A ball from St. Julien, yesterday,
crashed right through the altar, and brought the
cross on to the pavement in splinters. The fragment of a
shell from Des Bottes shivered a beautiful marble
monument, splitting it right up the centre, and
cutting in two the commemoration of the merits
of a respectable defunct villager. The Virgin
Mary, as she stood in marble against the wal
had a limb amputated, and was otherwise dismembered,
and if the pastor had been in the pulpit when another
shell struck it he would never have preached more. So hot
became the cross fire from the two fortresses that it
was judged advisable to withdraw the troops out
of the village a few hundred yards to the rear. The
feldwachts were of course left in their positions, as also
were two companies in the replie by the church; but the
rest fell back into an orchard behind the village. It
was great fun to be here and listen to the French pelting
the village, under the idea, no doubt, that it was full
of Prussian troops. We could hear the crashing of the
rafters and the smashing of the walls as the huge projec-
tiles tore through them, the shells exploding as they
struck, and sending into the air a cloud of fragments.
All this time the musketry fire on the foreposts was un-
cealing along a large portion of the line, and anyone
dropping in casually upon the scene would have
imagined that quite an important battle was in progress.
So little was this the case that the troops supporting
Noisseville and lying in Flanville and Retonfay were not
put under arms. The whole affair was an utterly useless