The Sun. — 1871-01-30 (London, England)

THE LAST GREAT SORTIE. (From the Times Correspondent.) It was so thick that the French were able to develope au enormous force on the approaches to these heights from St. Cloud and Ville d'lvray to Garches, Bugenval, and the slopes towards Vaucresson before there was any alarm. If there were not such an immense gulf between real trained soldiers in strong " stellung" and masses of armed men, it would be quite impossible for any one to believe that such a force as could be seen for some 3i or 4 miles covering the ground like a carpet could be prevented from doing as they pleased with two divisions of infantry. But so it was and so it will be. As an old officer said to me. " A carter is stronger than a jockey, but he cannot ride a race ; and yet a jockey can drive a carter's horses." Well, there have been, I hear, two computatiOns of the French dead. In front of one division  there lie some 1,100 dead. In front of another some what less, and, counting the prisoners and the wounded, it may well be that the French lost between six and seven thousand men in %H. And what have the Pruesians lost? I scarcely like to write the figures, but lam assured that they have had only seventy-seven men killed and 483 wounded. Among the former there is a large proportion of officers, for when the French were in Montretout village they picked out the officers of the detachment: which had to fight their way through the street. And then to take Montretout and to lose it as they did this very night—driven out ingloriously, disgracefully, without a shot almost, by an attack of a regiment of the 10th Division ! Why, a general with an army with a pinch of salt for their horse meat and such a basis of operations as Montretout ought to have hurled the sth Corps and all its supports out of Versailles this very night. But then Trochu has not an army ; he has only a gathering of men, whose individual weaknesses are multiplied by the numbers of their total force, and who are ready to die, but are unable to conquer. They advance far enough to be killed. They are too brave to run quite away. Their artillery practice was excellent. It was quite unlike the work done on the 21st of October. The air was not filled with the smoke of bursting shells, but constant puff balls of blinding white in the dark woods shewed where their shells were bursting in a way that would have proved most murderous to uncovered infantry. At this period, 11.30, it was also evident, first, that the French were very much in advance of theline they had occupied on the 21st of October ; and, secondly, they were four or five times as numerous. The ground between "Talerien and the river was blue with their masses. There was not a sunbeam to lighten them, but cavalry in white and light gray cloaks, and white and gray horses, and even field tents checkered the plains, and at times there rose. trails of smoke from camp fires, mingling with the clouds of " pulverdampf." From the ocean of bluish gray ruffled by these lines of lighter colour, streamed out the rivers of men towards the front, where they fretted iu a spray of smoke against the base of the hills and upon their slopes. I could not see the Prussians—a bad sign—so far back were they now, and more than once I found myself looking at the map for the trace of a route to the Crown Prince's headquarters, in case I was cut off in the prime of the day at Roquencourt or Marlay. The columns, of which there were three well-defined, moved very slowly, now coyly retiring, now gaily advancing." Had some fiery commander from Cnsar's Camp looked down on such work in the Long Valley, against Cocked-hat Wood, he would haply havb behaved as our men did in Flanders in Captain Shandy's time. But still they advanced and retired very steadily, and it was to be observed that the Divisional batteries of the 10th Division, under Colonel Roell, had posted themselves on the slims of