[Footnote 49: There are two versions of Dombrowski's earlier history. By his admirers he was said to have headed the last Polish insurrection: the party of order stigmatise him as a Russian adventurer, who had fought in Poland, but against the Poles, and in the Caucasus, in Italy, and in France--wherever; in fine, blows were to be given and money earned. He entered France, like many other adventurous knights, in Garibaldi's suite, came to Paris after the siege, and immediately after the outbreak of the eighteenth of March was created general by the Commune, and gathered round him in guise of staff the most illustrious, or least ignoble, of those foreign parasites and vagabonds, who have made of Paris a grand occidental Bohemian Babel. These soldiers of fortune, most of whom had been "unfortunate" at home, formed the marrow of the Commune's military strength.
Dombrowski had gained a name for intrepidity even among these men of reckless courage and adventurous lives. He maintained strict discipline, albeit to a not very moral purpose. Whoever dared connect his name with the word defeat was shot. Like many other Communist generals he took the most stringent measures for concealing the truth from his soldiers, and thus staved off total demoralisation until the Versailles troops were in the heart of Paris. His relations with the Federal authorities were not of an uniformly amiable character.]
[Footnote 50: A poor Italian smith told me he had three men seized. They had taken a stove near the fortifications of Ternes, when they were arrested. "But we are Italians!" they cried. It was no excuse, for the Federals replied, "Italians! so much the better; you shall serve as Garibaldians!"]
It was not enough that men should be riddled with balls and torn to pieces by shells. The women are also seized with a strange enthusiasm in their turn, and they too fall on the battle-field, victims of a terrible heroism. What extraordinary beings are these who exchange the needle for the needle-gun, the broom for the bayonet, who quit their children that they may die by the sides of their husbands or lovers? Amazons of the rabble, magnificent and abject, something between Penthesilea and Théroigne de Méricourt. There they are seen to pass as cantinières, among those who go forth to fight. The men are furious, the women are ferocious,--nothing can appal, nothing discourage them. At Neuilly, a vivandière is wounded in the head; she turns back a moment to staunch the blood, then returns to her post of danger. Another, in the 61st Battalion, boasts of having killed three _gardiens de la paix_[51] and several _gendarmes_. On the plain of Châtillon a woman joins a group of National Guards, takes her stand amongst them, loads her gun, fires, re-loads and fires again, without the slightest interruption. She is the last to retire, and even then turns back again and again to fire. A _cantinière_ of the 68th Battalion was killed by a fragment of shell which broke the little spirit-barrel she carried, and sent the splinters into her stomach. After the engagement of the 3rd of April, nine bodies were brought to the _mairie_ of Vaugirard. The poor women of the quarter crowd there, chattering and groaning, to look for husbands, brothers and son's. They tear a dingy lantern from each other, and put it close to the pale faces of the dead, amongst whom they find the body of a young woman literally riddled with shot. What means the wild rage that seizes upon these furies? Are they conscious of the crimes they commit; do they understand the cause for which they die? Yesterday, in a shop of the Rue de Montreuil, a woman entered with her gun on her shoulder and her bayonet covered with blood. "Wouldn't you do better to stay at home and wash your brats?" said an indignant neighbour. Whereupon arose a furious altercation, the virago working herself into such a fury that she sprang upon her adversary, and bit her violently in the throat, then withdrew a few steps, seized her gun, and was going to fire, when she suddenly turned pale, her weapon fell from her hands, and she sank back dead. In her wild passion she had broken a blood vessel. Such are the women of the people in this terrible year of 1871. It has its _cantinières_ as '93 had its _tricoteuses_,[52] but the cantinières are preferable, for the horrible in them partakes of a savage grandeur. Fighting as they are against brothers and kinsfolk, they are revolting, but against a foreign enemy, they would have been sublime.