PARIS AN IMPREGNABLE CITY.

Evening Post, Volume LVII, Issue 23, 28 January 1899, Page 10 (Supplement)

PARIS AN IMPREGNABLE CITY.

The French have been taught wisdom by past experience, and as a result have planned, and a few years ago finished, a system of fortifications round Paris which are probably unequalled for the purposes for which they are intended by any similar fortifications in the world. A wellinformed military writer, a member of the general staff of the German army, has given it as his opinion that a successful siege of Paris • would be, under present cony ditions, an impossible undertaking. The new fortifications that surround the French capital are some 15 or 20 miles from the city, and are connected with Paris, and with each other, by a railway system which would enable the French commander to quickly mass at one point a very large, body of men, while the general of the besieging army, if he wished to prevent the city from obtaining supplies, and thus shut in the people and the army that was defending it, would have to occupy a line extending over 100 miles, and hence could not by any possibility collect a large number of his force to resist, with any shadow of, hope, an attack of the enemy. It required a German army of ,approximately, 500,000 men to lay siege to Paris from 19th December, 1870, to 30th January, 1871 ; but the authority we refer to is of the opinion that to repeat the same operation, a German besieging army would have to number 2,000,000 men, and the work of maintaining such a force and properly handling its parts would be something which few Governments would care to undertake, and few military commanders would be able to efficiently perform. The French have spent upon these new fortifications an amount variously estimated at from £56,000,000 to £10,000,000, and hence can well afford to sell the land occupied by some of the now obsolete fortifications of a generation ago.