War Vignette From The Paris Commune

I am reading the 19th Century diaries of the brothers Goncourt just now. Edmond Goncourt, in the aftermath of the Paris Commune in 1871, describes a group of women Communard prisoners waiting to be  marched to Versailles and almost certain execution. They are freezing in the rain and generally defiant towards their captors although he describes some as flirting with the soldiers with a view to extracting a drink of water or possibly some sympathetic treatment or mercy. An officer shouts that any of the soldiers breaking ranks will be shot. A soldier describes one of the women as resembling another female Commundarde that one of his comrades had stabbed to death. The accounts of Goncourt on the Commune and the Franco- Prussian War of the previous year are a fascinating insight. Not least because he is a skilled observer and writer and paints a vivid picture. He must have been a cold man and was certainly very patrician to judge by his reactions. He visits the hospital at one stage during the  bombardment of Paris and describes the horrible injuries to men, women and children. Who would decide to make such a visit you have to ask. His descriptions of the horrors of war are as impersonal as a medical report or the verdict of a coroner. The scenes he describes could be from Baghdad in the present era.