The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (29 page)

M
AP
1. The Great Sortie

The feeling that Paris, and behind her France, had reached the brink of an abyss—or at least a Rubicon—was one shared by all Parisians as the hour of the ‘Great Sortie’ drew closer, but they were perhaps less pallid in their apprehension than the poet. Despite the last distribution of fresh meat to civilians having been made on November 21st, spirits had never been higher. That day Mr. Brown wrote to his wife in Kentish Town: ‘The most perfect order reigns and the resignation of the people to support the privations is admirable beyond all praise, they are as gay as ever and determined to support the Government they have chosen to the last extremity….’ The next day, Edwin Child, now a proud member of the National Guard, was writing enthusiastically to his mother: ‘A tremendous battle is expected day after day. There will be more than 200,000 men engaged upon the French side. What has been done in Paris since the Siege is nothing less than marvellous. This modern Babylon celebrated for its dolls and bonbons now makes cannons, mitrailleuses, converts ancient guns into modern ones, makes shots, shells and gunpowder by ton…. 100,000 men have been selected from out of the National Guard, armed and fully equipped for war, and a finer set of men it would be difficult to find…. The flower of the nation….’ He ended by declaring he would ‘like to see every Prussian exterminated’, adding a derogatory note for the neutralist Mr. Gladstone. On the 27th, the seventieth day of the Siege, Washburne remarked that ‘Paris has never before been so tranquil, and never before has there been so little crime. You do not hear of a murder, robbery, theft, or even a row, anywhere.’

Everywhere in these last few days there was a sense of urgent preparation, and nowhere more so than among the National Guard. Under the pressure of the repeated demands that the Guard participate in actual fighting, culminating in the outbreak of October 31st, the Government had yielded to the extent of forming special
Compagnies de Guerre
of the youngest and fittest which would march with the regulars in the ‘Great Sortie’. ‘If our brave brothers succumb’, their new commander, General Thomas, told them, ‘on us be the duty to avenge them!’ Endlessly they drilled themselves in the empty spaces around Paris, and a new vigour and sense of purpose seemed to have entered their movements. O’Shea of the
Standard
watched some Guard battalions, in a weird multiplicity of uniforms, march off to the front after a review outside the Opéra. He thought the accompanying
vivandières
, with their gaudy ‘Bloomer costumes’, plumed hats,
tricolore
-painted brandy-kegs slung from the hips, and Roman daggers or even little ivory-handled pistols tucked into their belts, a little too theatrical; but he admired the regimental bands composed of
pensioners who made brave attempts to wheezeout the
Chant du Départ
; and, above all, thought he detected for the first time ‘the groundwork of discipline’. The Belleville battalions, despite orders not to take their colours to the outposts, nevertheless marched with pennants on which had been embroidered Phrygian caps to distinguish them from the bourgeois units.

On November 26th, all the gates to the city were closed (giving the Prussians final confirmation of what was about to happen), and in the stampede to get in Goncourt saw a poor old man knocked over on a drawbridge, his spine broken. On the 28th, Washburne recorded that all the American ambulance waggons had been ordered to stand by to move at 6 a.m. the next morning; ‘there is something in the atmosphere and the general appearance of the city that betokens unusual events. The day is damp, chilly, gloomy and cloudy, but the streets are filled.’ That night, awoken by an immense cannonade which even out at Versailles had deprived an anxious King of Prussia of his sleep, Goncourt climbed up to the roof of his building. There, ‘in a night without stars’, he saw

from Fort Bicêtre as far as Fort Issy, over the whole stretch of this great semicircular line, a succession of small dots of fire that flicker up like gas-jets, followed by sonorous echoes. These great voices of death in the midst of the silence of the night stir one. After some time the howling of dogs joins in with the thunder of the cannon; frightened voices of awoken humans begin whispering; cockerels, men and women, everything lapses back into silence and my ear, straining out of the window, could hear nothing more than the cannonade in the distance, far in the distance, resembling the dull noise that an oar makes when it strikes the side of a boat.

On rising the next morning, Parisians found their walls plastered with proclamations heralding the Great Sortie. One, emanating from Trochu, was his shortest yet; the other, addressed by Ducrot to the Second Army (of which he was now the commander), ended on a note of immortal magnificence, evocative of all the military
grandeur de la France
. ‘As for myself,’ he declared, ‘I have made up my mind, and I swear before you and the entire nation; I shall only re-enter Paris dead or victorious. You may see me fall, but you will not see me yield ground. So do not halt, but avenge me.
En avant donc! en avant, que Dieu nous protége!
’ Parisian hearts beat loudly; how could the day not be won when the commander himself could make such a vow? ‘Here is a real soldier!’ cried Juliette Lambert.

Behind the scenes all was far from well. Bowles, who had passed the whole of the previous day at outposts near Issy, had picked up sinister ‘whisperings of “pontoons” and bridges having become a difficulty at
the last moment’. At dawn on the 29th Trochu, was at his battle H.Q. in Fort Rosny ‘when General Ducrot, in a state of indescribable agitation, came to report to me that a sudden rise in the level of the Marne had temporarily rendered our operation impossible’. In the first stage of the breakthrough, Ducrot’s primary objective was the heights around Villiers on the left bank of the Marne. All the Marne bridges having been blown at the time of the investment, everything depended on the provision of sufficient pontoons so that bridgeheads could be established at Bry and Champigny on either side of the Villiers loop. The pontoons had been successfully towed across Paris from the original site of the sortie, and by the night of the 28th were in readiness at Charenton. At 11 p.m., Ducrot’s chief engineer, Krantz, had given the order to advance the pontoon-train from the Seine into the Marne, through the St.-Maurice canal which lay just in French hands. Headed by the tug
Persévérance
, the canal was safely negotiated, but at Joinville it was brought to a halt. Here the Marne is perhaps a little wider than the Thames at Maidenhead, but even under normal conditions the current is much swifter. Now the debris of the destroyed Joinville bridge had formed a kind of barrage across the river; two out of three arches were blocked, though the third was navigable, provided there was no substantial rise in the water. This was a danger foreseen by Krantz, and ideally—as Ducrot admitted—the river under the other arches should have been cleared to avert it. But there had been no time; it was one of the ‘omissions’ which had had to be risked. And heavy rains had in fact swollen the Marne, so that torrents of angry water were surging through the one clear arch. The puffing
Persévérance
was brought to a standstill. It retired, fired its boilers almost to bursting-point, and then tried to charge the bridge again. This time it gained ground, and there seemed hope of its getting through, when three pontoons foundered, with their crews; causing a lengthy delay before another attempt could be made. At its third effort the
Persévérance
succeeded, but by now it was clearly too late to hope of getting the pontoons in position before daybreak.

Once again Ducrot saw all his plans collapsing about him, and it was in a state bordering on despair that he came to see Trochu. What was to be done? Call off the whole operation? Immediately both generals agreed that of this there could be no question; apart from anything else, the threat of revolt in Paris by a disappointed mob was still too grave to be risked. Not for the first or last time this factor, more than any military consideration, was the deciding one. So the main offensive would be postponed twenty-four hours, until the Marne subsided; meanwhile the subsidiary actions planned to be thrown in on the wings would still proceed that day, unsupported. It
was a decision that hardly pleased Vinoy, who was to execute the principal of these diversions, and the lost twenty-four hours were just long enough for Moltke, now precisely aware of Ducrot’s intentions, to push a division of Saxons in behind the weak Württemberger force covering the focal point of the line.

Paris, remained happily unaware of the latest hitch in ‘
Le Plan
’. In transports of delight, Juliette Lambert exclaimed (prematurely) in her journal: ‘
Enfin! Enfin!
Yesterday, while we were at the opera, the Great Sortie began! This great action, which Paris has been awaiting for two months, has been launched. What emotions are ours…!’ All through the 29th, Goncourt observed a general mood, quite alien to the city, of ‘concentrated meditation. In the public vehicles no one speaks; everybody has retired within himself, and women of the street regard what goes on round them with a blind man’s stare…. Any man who speaks, who suggests knowledge, is besieged.’ Little knots of anxious citizens hovered outside Government buildings and on the main thoroughfares leading to the battlefield, hoping for fragments of news. The strain of the suspense was intolerable. By the evening Goncourt found himself unusually irritable with his circle at Brébant’s.

On the other side of the ramparts, Bismarck’s secretary, Dr. Moritz Busch, who happened to be visiting an officer’s mess, found the lieutenants in confident high spirits: ‘having all sorts of fun… singing the song of the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne’.

The first news to be posted up outside the Hôtel de Ville was encouraging to the Parisians. ‘All General Ducrot’s divisions have crossed the Marne!’ As usual, Paris fastened on this early glimmer of hope, building out of it a resounding victory. Bourse prices ran up their biggest gains since September, and Louis Péguret, writing to his sister in the provinces, related how, at the ramparts that morning ‘some artillerymen told us that the battle was receding farther and farther from Paris towards the South; a little more and the Armies of the Loire and Paris will join hands.’ O’Shea overheard an old man say that ‘he did not think they should go to Berlin! Mainz would be far enough.’ Then, at 9 p.m. that night, out came an official communiqué stating baldly, ‘The object the Governor had in view has been attained’. To anyone acquainted with the Government’s delicate fibbery and still capable, after ten weeks of siege, of reading between its lines, it was only too plain that Ducrot had not broken through.

At the front the initial, and seemingly most delicate, stage of the operation had in fact gone off smoothly. By dawn on the 29th Ducrot had assembled enough pontoons to throw across bridgeheads at both
Champigny and Bry. Under cover of a tremendous barrage from Fort Nogent and from guns massed in the St.-Maur peninsula, the French succeeded in capturing and holding these two towns, without too much difficulty, during the morning. It was when they surmounted the steep escarpments leading up on to the Villiers plateau that they first ran into serious trouble. The Württembergers had established their centres of resistance in the parks of two châteaux, one at Cœuilly and the other at Villiers, and from positions carefully prepared behind stone walls in these parks their invisible riflemen directed a murderous fire on the attackers. The owner of the Château de Cœuilly, who had fled into Paris on the approach of the Germans, was with Ducrot, patriotically laying the French guns on to his own property (the
châtelaine
of Villiers, with perhaps equal courage, stayed in her home throughout the battle), and his shells exacted a heavy toll among the defenders. Three times the French attacked with a heroism which showed that, despite the long saga of defeats, the legendary
furia francese
was not totally dead. But each attempt collapsed, leaving heaps of blue-and-scarlet figures to enliven the seared winter grass, none closer than 150 yards to the park of Cœuilly. Casualties reached almost 1914 proportions; one regiment, the 42nd, lost its colonel and four hundred men. At Villiers the story was the same. Here it was the Zouaves, determined to erase the shame of their performance at Châtillon; but driven to despair at being decimated by a well-entrenched enemy (once again, a foretaste of the First World War) who never revealed himself.

The start of the Great Sortie had thrown the journalists of Paris into a frenzy of activity, and, accompanied by Gustave Doré and other war artists, they rushed about in little groups, trying to get first hand accounts from the returning wounded. But, not unlike the eminent war correspondents derided in Evelyn Waugh’s
Scoop
, most of them were satisfied with composing lurid descriptions of the fighting from a judicious distance. Of the Anglo-American contingency, hardly any troubled to get a
laissez-passer
to visit the front during the whole Siege. The outstanding exception was the least experienced, Tommy Bowles, and it is his eyewitness report of November 30th that seems the most trustworthy, as well as the most vivid. Bowles had established himself on a hill at Créteil, just west of the St.-Maur loop of the Marne and only five hundred yards from the Prussian lines, and from here he had a spectacular view of Ducrot’s men attacking southwards towards the Mesly heights in support of the main Champigny–Bry thrust. Shot and shell from the St.-Maur batteries whistled over the heads of the troops waiting in reserve behind Bowles. These included, he noted, the 170th (Belleville) Battalion of the

National Guard, at the front for the first time, and he was curious to see how it would behave. From a battery of field guns

… I saw the French skirmishers dotted thickly along the flank of the hill at a distance of 300 yards, and, a short distance beyond, the Prussians firing on them from the wood. In a minute or two the fusillade began in earnest—a rolling, rattling, crackling fire, which now and then swelled into a continuous roar. The road on the right was partially hidden by trees, but I could see the Prussian barricade indicated by an incessant curtain of white smoke, which distinguished it from the rest of the line, where the action was yet indicated only by little detached puffs. Suddenly the smoke of the barricade cleared off and was not renewed, and the instant after I saw a swarm of men running rapidly at and disappearing behind the barricade, which was thus taken at the point of the bayonet. The skirmishers on the left nevertheless continued in their position, running only to and fro along their line, while the Prussians kept up a vigorous fusillade, as we knew in the battery, for the balls occasionally fell around us, we being on higher ground and in the line of fire. Over the Marne I could see the red trousers swarming up the hills beyond Champigny, and the artillery alternately galloping up and firing, while the Prussian line had already—this was eleven o’clock—disappeared over the crest.