3-039-169 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Civil War in France: a shell at Suresnes - from a sketch taken immediately after the explosion, 1871. 'The Communist batteries on the Trocadero aimed at Fort Valérien, but the distance was too great, and their shells continually fell short, dropping into Suresnes and Puteaux, and inflicting much distress upon the inhabitants, who had taken no active part in the conflict...the shell, with a crash, went through a garret-window, sending the fragments of glass about and blowing out the clean white window-blind, which fell fluttering to the ground...[There was] thick smoke like a London fog smelling strong of villanous saltpetre and charged with lime and dust. As this cleared away, we could see the family - the man standing as if he had lost his reason; a gaping hole overhead where the shell had entered, and a yawning abyss at his feet, where it had gone through the floor to the rooms below. Slowly the darkness cleared away, and it was found that, as if by miracle, not one was touched. A basket-cradle was one of the first articles of furniture I could make out; but the mother had naturally seized her child, and the cradle was empty. A large mass, the ruins of a partition, which, I think, separated the bed-rooms, lay across the room'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.