On August 20th Gortschakoff entered the fortress, and went round the lines of defence, upon which the fire of the allies was just then at its height.  What he saw might well confirm him in his resolution to retreat.  There was no longer either a city or a suburb to defend, for both were heaps of rubbish and cinders.  The parapets of the works, dried in the heats of summer and split in huge fragments by the shot, were crumbling into the ditches.  The interior space was honeycombed with holes made by the shells.  Gabions and sandbags could not be procured to repair the embrasures, which remained in ruins.  Many of the dismounted guns could no longer be replaced, not because there were not plenty in the arsenals, but because to mount them by night, under the deadly fire of the mortars, entailed such frightful sacrifices of men.

The defenders of the works were packed in caves under the parapets; the gunners lay dead in heaps on the batteries; the wounded could not be removed by day, because the communications with the rear were now searched throughout by the fire of the allies, and so lay where they fell, in torment in the sun beside the more fortunate slain.  On landing, the Prince had passed the hospitals, full to overflowing, and the ambulances with the wounded crowding what had been the squares.  There was nothing to relieve the horrible monotony of destruction and devastation except the bridge, which promised retreat from this misery, and which was approaching completion.

Yet it was after this visit that the Russian General changed his mind in the direction of what he had before termed folly.  “I am resolved,” he wrote to the Minister of War, on September 1st, “to defend the south side to the last extremity, for it is the only honorable course which remains to us.”  Calculating that the daily loss of the garrison was from eight hundred to nine hundred, and that he could bring twenty-five thousand men from the army outside to reenforce it, by leaving only twenty thousand to guard the Mackenzie Heights, he considered he might still prolong the defence for a month.  Everything was against such a cruel determination; but he proceeded to execute it so far as in him lay.  Yet it did not rest with him to determine the end.

The cannonade once more reduced the Malakoff, its dependencies and neighbors, to absolute silence, and enabled the French to push their works yet closer.  The soil between the Mamelon and Malakoff could be cut into like a cheese, and the trenches were more easily made and better constructed here than elsewhere.  The English trenches before the Redan had been stopped by solid rock; the French approaches to the Little Redan, now only forty yards from it, had also got into soil so stony as no longer to afford cover.  The most advanced approach to the Malakoff was separated from it by only twenty-five yards; in the soft soil the trenches might have been pushed to the very edge of the ditch, but only with great loss, and, besides, the facility of mining below them would increase as the distance lessened.  It was therefore deemed that the time for assault had come, and it only remained to determine the details.