If Nicolas Flamel had not successfully stopped the fire Grindelwald set at Père Lachaise Cemetery back then, Paris would have suffered the same fate as Moscow, perhaps even worse. At least Moscow's people had evacuated beforehand, whereas Paris still had many people in the city. They would all have become sacrifices to magical fire.
Although Moscow had been lost, the Russians still won the Great Patriotic War. That alone made them better than Napoleon III.
What was more, the so-called "Versailles faction" had even aimed their cannons at their own civilians. In the end, the Paris Commune directly set fire to the Tuileries Palace. The blaze had nearly spread to the Louvre Museum and reduced its treasures to ashes.
Things could be remade after they were gone, and houses could be rebuilt after they were destroyed. When everyone lost everything to war and natural disasters, no one felt that things were unfair anymore.
It had been the same when London was bombed by German planes. The people emerging from air-raid shelters saw nothing but ruins.
It was not a sight one normally got to see, more than enough to brag about to descendants who had never experienced war for the rest of one's life.
Sirius had once bragged to Harry about his own experiences. As the only prisoner to have successfully escaped Azkaban so far, he truly had the right to show off.
Yet people had always assumed it was because he was an Animagus, using his dog form to fool the Dementors. No one had considered the tattoos on his body.
Perhaps Sirius had swum through the icy waters of the North Sea so smoothly because the gods had blessed him, preventing him from freezing to death like Jack on the Titanic.
Besides visually striking scenes, watching people in