The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (25 page)

To every corner of France – and beyond – the winds blew them, and they seldom had the remotest idea where they were on landing. Added to this, since a frustrated Bismarck had proclaimed that he would submit any apprehended balloonists to the fate of common line-crossers, there was always the prospect of a Prussian bullet at the end of each flight (although, on hearing the Prussian threat, another 172 aeronauts had promptly volunteered). It was perhaps hardly surprising that Bowles and his fellow correspondents should at times find balloonists demanding a £100 ‘bonus’ before accepting their dispatches.

Audace humaine! effort du captif! sainte rage!

Effraction enfin, plus forte que la cage!

Que fault-il à cet être, atome au large front,

Pour vaincre ce qui n’a ni fin, ni bord, ni fond,

Pour dompter le vent, trombe, et l’écume, avalanche?

Dans le ciel une toile et sur mer une planche.
¹

Thus wrote Hugo of these early cosmonauts, and indeed, faced with the unknown and the uncertainty of their conveyance, their ‘audacity’ cannot be exaggerated. But in the exhilaration of the moment – the sense of escape from the imprisonment of Paris, the champagne effect of altitude, the silence, and the beauty – fear seems to have been relegated to a minor role. After his flight, Gambetta described himself as ‘stupefied at the total obliteration of the picturesque in the boundless expanse beneath’; Durouf claims to have been preoccupied by the spectacle of the Prussian cannon-balls rising and falling back below him; Buffet, flying at night, by the lights of the ramparts that seemed to ‘surround the city with a girdle of fire’; and another balloonist by hearing a cock crow at two thousand metres in the extraordinary silence of the sky. Cheerfully and defiantly, crews uncorked wine in their precarious baskets to toast ‘Death to the invaders!
Vive la France!
’ as they sailed over the Prussian lines.

In the deserted halls of the Gare d’Orléans, Eugène Godard, veteran of some eight hundred flights, had set up an assembly line for fabricating balloons, and scattered across Paris were small ancillary workshops. Conducted by Nadar to a former dance-hall at Montmartre,
Théophile Gautier found some sixty young women sewing away with furious industry, reminding him of the ‘humming of old-fashioned spinning-wheels’. At the Gare du Nord, where rails already rusted over with grass beginning to grow between them made Bowles think of the Sleeping Beauty, the completed balloons were varnished; stretched out, partially inflated, like rows of massive whales. In the waiting-rooms here and at the Gare du Nord, sailors were busy braiding ropes and halliards. The specifications were rigid; each balloon had to have a capacity of two thousand cubic metres at least, and be capable of lifting four people, plus an additional five hundred kilogrammes in weight.
¹
For each satisfactory product, the factory received 4,000 francs (of which 300 were earmarked for the pilot), but there was a ‘penalty clause’ imposing a 50-franc fine for every day delivery fell behind schedule. (In fact, the economics of the operation proved highly favourable to the Government, since each balloon could carry 100,000 letters, bringing in a revenue of 20,000 francs.)

Where could sufficient numbers of trained aeronauts be found to man the balloons? Soon the ‘professionals’ would all have flown out of Paris. Godard solved this by setting up a training-school within the factory. Baskets were suspended from the station girders, containing all the essential controls to simulate flight—valves, ballast, guide-ropes, etc. Godard’s sailors in particular (possibly because they were less prone to sea-sickness) proved themselves markedly proficient in a short time; of the. 65 balloons that left Paris during the Siege, only 18 were piloted by professionals, 17 by volunteers, and the remaining 30 by sailors.

A more intractable problem was that the balloons afforded only a one-sided means of communication. ‘With the aeronaut’, sighed Gautier, ‘flew our thoughts too, our messages for our absent loved ones, the very beating of our hearts, all that is good, tender, and delicate in the human soul. On this fragile paper even those who affect a stoical smile have shed a tear.’ But how could the ‘absent loved ones’ acknowledge this outpouring of affection and anxiety? The balloons were, of course, unsteerable. ‘People dreamed only of balloons’, remarked Gautier. ‘They interrogate the wind and sound the depths of the sky. Chemists and scientists share but one idea, to control the direction of the balloons’, A Government grant of 40,000 francs was made to a well-known naval engineer, Dupuy de Lôme, to construct a steerable balloon, and he produced a drawing of a cigar-shaped vehicle with a propeller rotated by a man and a supplementary sail. Even before the war, Tissandier (who later piloted the
Céleste
out of Paris) had contemplated the possibility of building a
huge ‘dirigible’ propelled by a 400 h.p. steam engine, and now cranks besieged him with futuristic ideas; even Victor Hugo contributed his. They ranged from sails, oars, and rockets to the harnessing of ten thousand pigeons.
La Petite Presse
of November 7th reported that, in an experiment at the Jardin des Plantes, it had been proved that four eagles could shift a five-ton waggon; a story that was taken up in all credulity by the
Pall Mall Gazette
, which insisted that ‘four or six powerful birds were harnessed to the balloon, and were guided by an aeronaut by means of a piece of raw flesh fastened to the end of a long stick, which was held in front of their beaks’. There was a proposal by an Englishman to run an aerial telegraph wire to Paris, borne high over the lines between two balloons a hundred kilometres apart, and someone even proposed that Paris could be victualled by a thousand Montgolfier balloons, each bearing a single cow.

One balloon, the
Duquesne
, actually left-Paris equipped with a propeller hand-driven by three beefy sailors; but it still flew in the opposite direction to that intended. The most serious, and persistent, attempts to balloon back into Paris were made by Tissandier. By October 19th, he was at Chartres, waiting for a favourable wind that would waft him towards Paris. The whole city was plunged into darkness as the greedy balloon consumed its last gas, and was still only partly expanded. Then an excited officer rushed up to warn Tissandier to take off at once, as the Prussians were close at hand. But a strong gust of wind blew the under-inflated balloon into a tree, where it exploded. At the beginning of November, Tissandier was trying again, this time from Rouen. For a week he waited. At last the wind seemed right, and he leaped into the basket of the
Jean Bart
. As the balloonist took off, someone thrust a piece of paper into his hand, which he took to be an important dispatch, only to discover to his disgust that it was a brochure from a local tailor. The
Jean Bart
disappeared for three hours into thick clouds and fog. When it emerged, Tissandier saw that he had hardly moved and that the wind was beginning to turn against him. On a third attempt he narrowly escaped being blown out to sea. Right up to the capitulation of Paris, the balloonists were still trying. But none ever succeeded in making the return journey.

Other methods devised for communicating with Paris included a submarine, and glass globules that were to be floated down the Seine (but unfortunately it froze); and one balloon even carried with it divers’ suits with a similar project in mind (but unfortunately it landed in Bavaria). Five messenger dogs were used (unsuccessfully) and several brave foot-couriers tried to run the blockade. With great ingenuity, they secreted minuscule messages in hollow buttons, in the soles of their shoes, and even in slits under their skins; but most
of them were caught and several were shot. Only one, a postman called Létoile Simon, succeeded in making the trip both ways, and he was awarded the
Médaille Militaire
.

The humble carrier-pigeon was to prove the only means of breaking the blockade in reverse. In Paris there was an expert in microphotography called Dagron, who before the war had invented a ring called a ‘Stanhope’ containing a tiny photograph magnified by a gem-like lens, a novelty that had sold in vast quantities at the Great Exhibition of 1867. Early on November 12th, Dagron and his equipment had set out from Paris in two balloons. the
Niepce
and the
Daguerre
. Both were blown towards the east; before the horrified eyes of Dagron in the
Niepce
, the
Daguerre
came down and was promptly seized by Prussians. When the crew of the
Niepce
desperately tried to gain altitude by heaping out ballast, the sacks of sand proved to be rotten and burst in the gondola. All fell to bailing out the sand with Dagron’s photographic beakers; some of the precious equipment had to be jettisoned too, but the
Niepce
escaped. Eventually Dagron reached Tours, where, although badly handicapped and delayed by the loss of equipment, he set up the first microphotography unit ever to be employed in war. Government dispatches in Tours were reduced to a minute size, printed on feathery collodion membranes, then rolled into a pellicle; so that one pigeon could carry up to 40,000 dispatches, equivalent to the contents of a complete book. On reaching Paris, the dispatches were projected by magic lantern and transcribed by a battery of clerks. Sometimes one pigeon-load alone would require a whole week to decipher and distribute. As well as carrying official messages, the pigeons were entrusted with a vast amount of precious personal correspondence. In England in late November, the G.P.O. announced facilities for sending letters, via the French Post Office, into Paris; they were to consist of no more than twenty words, the charge for which was fivepence per word; the announcement ending with the caution that the French Post Office ‘cannot guarantee the safe delivery of this correspondence, and will not in any way be responsible for it’. The front page of
The Times
was also frequently filled with advertisements from relatives of the besieged, microfilmed in entirety to the size of a small snapshot, and relayed by pigeon.
¹
Another device were the ‘
oui ou non
’ letters sent by ‘
ballon-monté
’ containing four questions, each with a number. The replies
pigeoned back into Paris were published in Government bulletins.

In the course of the Siege, 302 birds were sent off, of which 59 actually reached Paris. The remainder were taken by birds of prey, died of cold and hunger, or ended in Prussian pies.
¹
Some of those captured on board the
Daguerre
were released by the Prussians, carrying demoralizing ‘deception’ messages. But they were betrayed by their suspiciously Germanic wording, as well as by being signed by an ‘André Lavertujon’, who had in fact never left Paris. The great drawback to the pigeon post was its unreliability and, as the days grew shorter, the arrival of the pigeons—unable to fly by night—became increasingly erratic. One, released at Orléans on November 18th, did not in fact reach Paris until February 6th, a week after the Siege ended. But although, for reasons that will emerge later (which were far from being entirely the fault of the balloonists or the pigeons), the strategic role of the aerial pests was limited, their effect on civilian morale in Paris was incalculably great. A
Daily News
correspondent in the provinces noted ‘one of the most plaintive of the laments sent from Paris was “we have had no pigeon for eight days”.’ During such a hiatus spirits slumped. When the war ended, there was serious talk of rewarding the noble birds, which some compared to the geese of Rome, by the incorporation of a pigeon in the city coat of arms.

As more and more balloons safely reached unoccupied France, the Prussians were not allowing this threat to their blockade to go uncontested. In the occupied areas stern orders were issued for all scattered dispatches to be handed over to the Prussian authorities, and after his warnings of draconian reprisals had gone unheeded, Bismarck himself ordered Alfred Krupp to design a special anti-balloon cannon. When at last it arrived, it was an ingenious forerunner of modern weapons, described by the Crown Prince of Prussia as ‘resembling a rocket battery’, and by others as ‘a long mobile barrel mounted on an axis, more resembling a telescope than a cannon’. It could allegedly fire a 3-lb. grenade to a height of 2,000 feet, yet seems to have been strangely ineffective. An American adventurer called Wells who offered the Prussians to take to the skies as a ‘balloon-interceptor’ ended in a crash, and Wells transferred his services to the French at Bordeaux. Other attempts to install sharp-shooters in balloons apparently ended in equal disaster. The most effective challenge to the French balloonists was provided by the Prussian observation-posts set up all round Paris, which reported the course of the balloons leaving the city along Moltke’s incomparable telegraph network. This resulted in their being shadowed during much
of their flight over occupied territory by detachments of vigilant Uhlans, waiting to pounce upon any descending balloon. The new technique began to have its successes. First, the
Montgolfier
was seized on landing in Alsace after a three-hundred-mile flight. Two days later the
Vauban
carrying Reitlinger, a special emissary of Jules Favre, descended in a forest near Verdun, and Reitlinger only reached the Belgian frontier after the narrowest of escapes from Uhlan patrols. That same day the
Normandie
, bearing among others the young nephew of Worth, the English
couturier
, also came down near Verdun. Worth, Cuzon the pilot, and another passenger all jumped out prematurely, leaving the wretched remaining passenger, Manceau, soaring aloft like an arrow in the lightened balloon. Manceau managed to release the gas valve, redescended, but panicked when still some thirty feet from the ground. He likewise jumped out, breaking his leg. All four were seized by Prussian patrols, badly treated, and threatened with a firing-squad. This probably would have been their fate, had not Worth been a British subject on whose behalf repeated representations were made in London.