The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (16 page)

Deserters from the Battle of Châtillon

5. The Investment

W
ITH
inexorable speed Moltke’s forces were now closing in on the capital. There would be many ways in which the Franco-Prussian War represented a turning-point between classical forms of warfare and those of the twentieth century. But the continuous post-1914 front, formed by mass armies standing shoulder to shoulder, had not yet arrived. As at Waterloo, armies still wheeled and manœeuvred in relatively compact formations with the aim of seeking out and bringing to battle the enemy’s principal forces, rather than of invading and occupying his territory. It was in Paris that what was left of the French Army now lay, and additionally Paris was capital of one of the world’s most highly centralized countries. Thus, upon the Prussian General Staff, Paris now exerted a doubly irresistible magnetism; for once Paris and the forces there could be made to surrender, would not France herself inevitably have to sue for terms? For the time being, the rest of France could be left virtually in a vacuum. With the exception of Prince Frederick-Charles’s force, comprised of elements of the First and Second Army, encamped about Metz, and lesser units detailed off to invest Strasbourg and the other fortresses, as well as guarding lines of communication, the bulk of the German Army moved towards Paris.

Down the three principal convergent roads they poured, two
Armies strong, sustained by a consumption of looted wine so enormous that the accompanying General Sheridan reported ‘two almost continuous lines of broken bottles along the roadsides all the way down from Sedan’. Hardly had Louis-Napoleon offered up his sword than Moltke turned about his great masses amid cries of ‘
Nach Paris
!’ so that already by September 4th King Wilhelm had reached Rethel and the following day he was at Reims. There columns of curious German troops filed past the altar where Joan of Arc had unfurled her standard and where the Kings of France had been consecrated. The following week the Prussians were marching down the beautiful Marne where forty-four years later, almost to the day, another Moltke’s dreams of reaching Paris would fall to pieces. On September 15th a train that had set forth from the Gare du Nord was seized by Prussian outriders at Senlis, twenty-seven miles north of Paris, and that same day Moltke held a council-of-war at Château-Thierry at which, with his usual methodical detail, he allotted his commanders the positions they were to assume around Paris. Like the claws of a crab, the Army of the Meuse under the Crown Prince of Saxony (the impetuous General Steinmetz having been relegated to a governorship in Poland) was to envelop the north of Paris, while the Prussian Crown Prince’s Third Army swung round the southern side. On September 17th the encircling movement began. To their surprise, the Saxons found themselves permitted to move in close under the northern forts of Paris without opposition, and by the 18th Crown Prince Frederick had already crossed the Seine south of Paris, cutting the railway to Orléans. The following day Lord Lyons and the last of the
corps diplomatique
to leave Paris made a hasty exit, with the Papal Nuncio, Monseigneur Chigi, formally bestowing his blessing upon both the opposing camps as he passed through the lines.

Back in Germany the surrender at Sedan had been greeted with wild scenes of jubilation. Berliners had garlanded with laurels the statues of national heroes on Unter den Linden, and on all sides a new note of aggressive belligerence had begun to be heard. General von Blumenthal wrote down in his journal, ‘We ought to crush them so that they will not be able to breathe for a hundred years’, and Lutheran pastors preached fire-eating sermons about the men of Israel pursuing the Philistines. In their appreciations, however, the leaders were rather less sanguine. After the September 4th revolution, King Wilhelm himself had been heard to remark gloomily, ‘The war is only just beginning now. They will now bring about the
levée en masse
.’ Bismarck, claimed General Sheridan, ‘dreaded’ the establishment of a Republic, and did not approve of the movement of the German armies on Paris so soon after Sedan. From a purely tactical
point of view, the 122,000 infantry and 24,000 cavalry with which the investment had been carried out seemed dangerously inadequate for laying siege to a city with half a million armed men in it, along a fifty-mile perimeter, which would allow an estimated density of only one infantryman per yard. Moltke prayed that the stunned French would not discover the numerical weakness of the besieging force until it was properly dug in, or until Frederick-Charles’ army was released from the siege of Metz; on the other hand, Prussian Intelligence reckoned that supplies in Paris could only suffice for a siege lasting, at the very most, ten weeks. Added to this, a letter had been received from a Prussophile Englishman (admittedly he sounded like something of a crank) warning of terrible pits and traps laid in the woods around Paris. All in all, as the Prussian forces moved into their siege positions, with the precision of the tumblers of a well-designed lock, everything dictated the utmost prudence. There was certainly no idea in the mind of that thin-lipped, cautious gambler, Moltke, of a sudden brutal thrust that might break the line of the Paris forts before the defenders had a chance to weigh up their opponents.

From the French point of view, as the Prussian Crown Prince’s army moved westwards past the southern line of forts towards Versailles, its exposed and extended flank offered something as temptingly vulnerable as that which the famous Governor of Paris, Galliéni, spotted in 1914, precipitating the Battle of the Marne. Alas, though, this apparently golden first opportunity was to reveal that Trochu was no Galliéni (nor, it must be admitted, were his troops those of France in 1914). In their movement around both sides of Paris, the Prussian reconnaissance units had been agreeably surprised to meet with hardly any resistance and to discover that no major French force had been installed outside the ring of forts. But on September 19th an action took place, developing into the first real battle of the siege, which was to have a doubly pernicious influence on all of Trochu’s subsequent operations.

Just to the south of Paris rises a feature called the Châtillon Plateau. Today it is intersected by route N20 to Orléans, and on it stands a nuclear research centre. From the city its eminence is not obvious, but it affords even today—although the city suburbs have grown up around it—one of the most remarkable panoramic views of Paris. Standing there you feel you can almost reach out and touch the domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides. Three of the principal forts guarding that side of Paris were dangerously vulnerable to enemy heavy batteries placed on the Châtillon Plateau; worse still, as Paris was to discover later on, from it monster guns such as Herr Krupp
had exhibited in 1867 could actually strike at the heart of Paris itself. On the plateau were a number of small French outposts held by XIV Corps, now commanded (together with XIII Corps) by General Ducrot. Captured in the
pot de chambre
of Sedan, the general had managed to escape (Bismarck claimed he had broken his parole and would, if caught, be shot) and was now Trochu’s right-hand man, as fiery and vigorous as ever. His outposts at Châtillon could see the Crown Prince’s army moving steadily along the main road to Versailles across his front with its flank turned almost insolently towards him. The sight was too much for this peppery veteran, who had been present at so many of the summer battles where French forces had been repeatedly crushed by resting too much on the defensive. He urged Trochu to allow him to throw in an attack on the Versailles road which, if successful, would assure French tenancy of the Châtillon heights at the same time as it severed a line of communication essential to a close investment of Paris.

With words that were to seem increasingly typical as the Siege proceeded, Trochu instructed Ducrot ‘… you could probe his [the Crown Prince’s] flank, but with the greatest circumspection’. To Ducrot, fuming, this was far from adequate; either he must strike with full force before the enemy could establish himself at Châtillon, or do nothing at all. Trochu, defending himself
ex post facto
, accused Ducrot of wanting to implement ‘an act of high military imprudence’, adding (not without reason) that if he had permitted Ducrot to throw in his XIII Corps as well, ‘the Siege of Paris would have ended there’. Thus a compromise operation was agreed on, the purpose of which, said Trochu (again
ex post facto
), was merely to make the Germans think they could not take Paris without a hard fight.

Shortly after dawn on the 19th Ducrot’s men issued forth on France’s first major action since the disaster at Sedan. Ducrot’s operational plan was simple, for ‘one could not expect more from such raw troops. Alas! They were unfortunately even rawer than the Commander-in-Chief thought….’ On the right, attacking through what are now charming woods and pleasure parks at Meudon, were a regiment of Zouaves which, far from being the legendary tough veterans of North African
razzias
(‘the friends of my dear Guards’ as Queen Victoria had once called them), was composed largely of young recruits. Although for most of them this was their first battle they had absorbed all the tales of terror their elders had to tell about the Prussians. There had been the usual muddle of the
Intendance
with ammunition not arriving on time, but now it had reached the Zouaves and they were huddled together distributing it. Suddenly shells from a well-trained Prussian field-gun battery descended
among them. Some of the young Zouaves panicked and a chain-reaction set in. Nearby a battalion of unblooded
Mobiles
, alarmed by the desperate cries of the Zouaves, began firing at each other in the early-morning mist. In the midst of this incipient chaos, the gallant Ducrot himself arrived ‘at the gallop’. Exhorting, cajoling, threatening, he was able to bolster up the courage of the faltering
Mobiles
, but the Zouaves were beyond repair. With those baneful exculpatory cries of ‘
Nous sommes trahis
’—‘we are betrayed’—all too frequently heard on battlefields where fortune has deserted French arms, they decamped in groups towards Paris, and the sight of the renowned red pantaloons fleeing provoked less chic infantrymen to follow suit.

The streets of Montparnasse were soon full of deserters. There Goncourt met a small platoon of returning Zouaves. ‘They said that they were all that remained of a body of two thousand men of which they had been part. Farther away, a terrified
Mobile
was relating that the Prussians numbered a hundred thousand in the Bois de Meudon, that Vinoy’s Corps had been dispersed like shot out of a gun…. One sensed in all these accounts the madness of fear, the hallucinations of panic.’ Later, this time near the Madeleine, he met more Zouaves, whom he studied with the analytical interest of the diarist: ‘the expression of the deserter is empty, dull, glaucously diffuse; he can concentrate on nothing, can resolve on nothing.’ Other Parisians were less detached; to troops who claimed that their officers had abandoned them, an American overheard a ‘red hag’ retort ‘Perhaps
you
left them at the front’. Louis Péguret, who had just reported for service with the 115th Battalion of the National Guard, found himself besieged by the fugitives: ‘They said it was intended they should be massacred, because they had been sent into battle without cartridges. They lied, for we inspected their pouches, and, not only did they have ammunition, but not a single packet of cartridges had been undone, not a single shot had been fired by these cowards.’

At the front, Ducrot was attempting to consolidate, urging that the Châtillon redoubt, a last toe-hold on the vital plateau, should be held at all costs. But for all the work Trochu had ordered done on the lines of forts, virtually nothing had been carried out so far beyond the permanent fortifications. Thus the redoubt by itself was clearly indefensible, and the final decision was imposed upon Ducrot when he discovered that some inspired official had, the previous evening, ordered the destruction of the waterworks at Choisy-le-Roi which alone supplied water to the Châtillon Plateau. Reluctantly the order to retreat within the line of forts was given, and—although various unsuccessful attempts were made during the remainder of the month
to dispute the issue—this vital position was abandoned to the enemy. The Prussian Crown Prince could barely believe his good fortune, but because of prevailing fears of the precariousness of the investing forces, no attempt at a follow-up was made. As the French later admitted, the southern forts were still by no means ready to repel a full-scale attack, and a rapid pursuit on the heels of the demoralized Châtillon fugitives might well have ended the war then and there. But this was no more Moltke’s way of waging war than it was Montgomery of Alamein’s.

On September 20th Uhlans from the two Prussian armies joined hands near Versailles, which surrendered without a shot. The Siege was set. Paris was now severed from the rest of France; unlike Leningrad, where the besieging Nazis suffered the disadvantage of never being able completely to close the iron ring around the city. That same day the Crown Prince of Prussia stood on a height overlooking the city and gazed down at the glistening gilt dome of the Invalides that seemed so incredibly close. W. H. Russell of
The Times
who was with him thought it ‘as fair a sight as eye could see’, and then lay down to have a good look at the fortifications with his telescope. ‘Men were working in the trenches with a will. As I swept the line of Vanves I caught sight of an officer in an embrasure looking earnestly up in the direction of the plateau through his glass, and evidently directing the gunners at the piece by his side. I could look straight down into its muzzle’. This magical view of the invested city immediately evoked in the Crown Prince’s mind memories of ‘the fine warm Sunday in the year 1867 on which the fountains played here in honour of my father and the Tsar Alexander….’ At his former host’s abandoned palace of St.-Cloud, where the staircase was dominated by a huge oil-painting of his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, arriving there in state only fifteen years previously, the Crown Prince now found upon a desk a stack of invitation cards headed
‘Impératrice Régente’
. How swiftly and ruthlessly the wheel of Fortune had swung about! Here was what had long been Europe’s greatest military power abjectly humbled, and the enemy capital—that Babylon of modern times—stretched out before Prussia’s grasp.