Guards try in vain to keep order.  To add to the difficulties there is some form to be gone through about passes.  I manage to hang on to a cart which is just going over the bridge; after a thousand stoppages and a great deal of pushing and squeezing, I succeeded in getting out, my clothes in rags.  A desolate scene meets my eyes.  In front of us, is the open space called the military zone, a dusty desert, with but one building remaining, the chapel of Longchamps; it has been converted into an ambulance, and the white flag with the red cross is waving above it.  Truly the wounded there must be in no little danger from the shells, as it lies directly in their path.  To the left is the Bois de Boulogne, or rather what used to be the wood, for from where I stand but few trees are visible, the rest is a barren waste.  I hasten on, besides I am hard pressed from behind.  Here we are in Neuilly, at last.  The desolation is fearful, the reality surpassing all I could have imagined.  Nearly all the roofs of the houses are battered in, rafters stick out of the broken windows; some of the walls, too, have fallen, and those that remain standing are riddled with blackened holes.  It is there that the dreadful shells have entered, breaking, grinding furniture, pictures, glasses, and even human beings.  We crunch broken glass beneath our feet at every step; there is not a whole pane in all the windows.  Here and there are houses which the bullets seemed to have delighted to pound to atoms, and from which dense clouds of red and white dust are wafted towards us.  Well, Parisians, what do you say to that?  Do you not think that Citizen Cluseret, although an American, is an excellent patriot, and “In consideration of Neuilly being in ruins, and of this happy result being chiefly due to the glorious resistance organized by the delegate Citizen Cluseret, decrees:  That the destroyer of Neuilly, Citizen Cluseret, has merited the gratitude of France and the Republic.”

[Illustration:  THE INHABITANTS OF NEUILLY ENTERING PARIS DURING THE ARMISTICE OF THE 28TH OF APRIL

The firing ceased from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, when Paris cabs, furniture-vans, ambulance-waggons, band-barrows, and all sorts of vehicles were requisitioned to bring in the sad remains and dilapidated household goods of the suburban bombardes.  They entered by the gate of Ternes—­for that of Porte Maillot was in ruins and impassable.  Many went to the Palais de l’Industrie, in the Champs Elysees, where a commission sat to allot vacant apartments in Paris.  On this occasion some robberies were committed, and refractories escaped:  it is even said that hard-hearted landlords wished to prevent their lodgers from departing—­an object in which the proprietors were not very successful.  The poor woman perched on the top of her relics, saved from the cellar in which she had lived in terror for fourteen days, deplores the loss of her husband and the shapeless mass of ruin and rubbish she once called her happy home; whilst her boys bring in green stuff from the surburban gardens, and a middle-aged neighbour stalks along with his pet parrot, the bird all the while amusing himself with elaborate imitations of the growl of the mitrailleuse and the hissing of shells ending with terrific and oft-repeated explosions.]