"Three."
"You have been wounded?"
"Yes, by a ball in the head."
"Leberg, you have been with a master, and you were surprised taking the cash-box. How much did you take?"
"Ten sous."
"Did not that money burn your hands?"
And you, red-handed man! these words, do they not burn your lips? Sinister fools! who do not understand that before these children, thrown into the streets without education, without hope, through the necessity you have made for them, the culprit is you, lace-bedecked soldier, you, the public minister of a society in which children twelve years old, capable and willing to work, are forced to steal in order to get a pair of stockings, and have no other alternative than to fall beneath bullets or die of hunger!
FOOTNOTES:
[239] These details are extracted from very numerous notes furnished not only by the prisoners, among others by Elisée Reclus, but by persons entire strangers to the Commune, municipal councillors of seaport towns, foreign journalists, &c.
[240] General Appert's report is not only silent with regard to these ignominious proceedings, but lies with a placidity that is frightful. He says, for instance, "The prisoners of the pontoons were treated like the sailors, with this difference, that they did no work and got frequent distributions of wine." Of the cages, the vermin, the blows, not a word. In the same manner he recounts, in the style of a pretentious quartermaster, the history of the Commune and of the last struggles. It would be doing him too much honour to point out how his absurd statements contradict each other. And yet it is from these official lies that all bourgeois historians have till to-day compiled their histories.