The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (30 page)

The prospects looked favourable, but, half an hour later Bowles was reporting that the action to his immediate front

… seemed to warm, and some of the French skirmishers began to fall back—in very good order, however—firing and turning slowly. Wounded men, pale and bloody, now began to arrive, some borne on
brancards
.

For half an hour I followed the action from my post; but then impatience got the better of me, and I took horse and rode along towards the front….

Reaching a captured Prussian barricade, Bowles was met

… by a crowd of breathless men swarming around and through it, and running to the shelter of a wall on the right of the road. Beyond I could see others running up, and as I foresaw confusion I thought it best to return, which I did under a considerably increased accompaniment of balls. As I re-entered the village and came upon the supports, I was eagerly questioned by officers and men. ‘
Nous battons en retraite, n’est-ce-pas?
’ said they, feverishly; and I was forced to reply that I thought so. The Belleville Battalion was there, and their remarks were not calculated to inspire confidence in their courage.
‘Nous sommes battus’
, they said, looking with pale faces at one another, while some of them silently left the ranks, and walked with a careless air towards the rear.

Advancing again, I found that the skirmishers were huddled up rather than rallied behind their wall, while the road, which before had been perfectly deserted, was covered with stragglers making for the village in a weary, downcast way. To them from the front came a gendarme, who rode about furiously, asking them, ‘Are you wounded?’ and on the negative reply, bidding them with oaths to return to the front. I saw that the fortune of battle had, indeed, distinctly turned. The French were now running fast back over the crest of the hill, and the supports had retired with the artillery into the valley in a line with the village on the right. As I was looking I saw the Prussian artillery appear on the hill, make a half turn, and send a shell instantaneously into the village, where it blew a house behind me into shatters….

It was now half past twelve. I returned to the Place in the centre of the village opposite to the church. Such a scene as there grew up before me in a moment or two I hope I shall never behold again. The pavement was covered with wounded men, generally half-undressed, and lying there helplessly, while one surgeon was doing his best to attend to them. In the middle of the Place a seething mob of soldiers of all arms struggled and wrestled to get through the village, without order, without leaders, without any idea what to do or whither to go, unless it were to avoid the Prussians. Every moment the mob increased, with every moment the panic became greater and the struggle to get through fiercer. They fought with each other, they swayed to and fro, a moving mass of men and gleaming arms, they pressed out on either side till they filled the little Place, and trampled even on their wounded comrades, whom the first comers had avoided. It was not an army that was retreating, it was not even a respectable mob. But this attack was but a diversion, and the main result of the engagement was entirely successful….

Here Bowles was deceived. What he had witnessed was all too faithful a miniature of that which was to follow in the afternoon on the Villiers plateau. Riding about the front with utter fearlessness on a magnificent white charger, pushing defaulters back into the line at the point of his sabre, Ducrot watched the frontal assaults on Villiers and Cœuilly bog down. He had expected the Villiers plateau, key to the whole operation, to be a tough nut to crack frontally and therefore had detailed off the whole of III Corps, led by General d’Exea, to carry out a powerful flanking operation. D’Exea was to cross the Marne further upstream at Neuilly, capture Noisy-le-Grand, and then move on Villiers from the north-east. He was the Blücher of that day, but a Blücher who did not arrive in time. His crossing of the Marne was badly slowed up by the shortage of pontoons, so that not until midday had the bulk of III Corps got across. Furiously Ducrot kept training his glasses on his left flank, but still no sign of d’Exea. Then at last he saw a dense mass of men approaching him from the direction of Noisy. His heart leaped, and he sent off a cavalry detachment to hasten the tardy d’Exea towards his objective. But the scouts were met with a volley of rifle shots; the force spotted by Ducrot was
in fact the first body of Saxons ordered up by Moltke to reinforce the Württembergers. Coolly Ducrot commanded the men around him to lie down, take aim, but hold their fire. Not until the enemy were at point-blank range did Ducrot give the order to fire; he himself ‘broke his sword in the body of a German soldier’, and the Saxons fell back in disarray.

At last one of d’Exea’s divisions, commanded by the de Bellemare of Le Bourget fame who had at last received the promotion he coveted, was seen advancing slowly from its bridgehead. But to Ducrot’s intense rage it was advancing in the wrong direction; not on Noisy-le-Grand, but obliquely towards Bry which had been in French hands since early morning, where it only further encumbered an already saturated area, getting hopelessly mixed up with troops of other divisions. It was now 3 p.m., and it was clear that there could be no flank attack on Villiers that day. Still the costly frontal attempts continued, but in vain. In another hour the short winter day began to fade, leaving the French spearhead precariously perched on the Villiers plateau to face the dreaded Prussian counter-attacks that could be expected the next day. By that evening Ducrot knew the Great Sortie had failed. The sensible thing he knew, too, would have been to withdraw back across the Marne; but once again fear of the Paris mob overruled good sense. Besides, after his flamboyant proclamation, how could he return—alive, but unvictorious?

The various diversionary efforts on other parts of the front had also ended in costly failures. At Choisy-le-Roi and L’Hay alone Vinoy had lost a thousand in dead and wounded, and 300 prisoners. Only at the north of Paris had the Marines, operating from St.-Denis under Admiral de la Roncière le Noury, scored a minor success in taking a village called Épinay-sur-Seine; but this was itself to have unattended repercussions as disastrous as the failure at Villiers. In Paris, the Government rivalled the. street in its eagerness to read unqualified success into the random bulletins reaching it from the front. On the late afternoon of the 30th, Jules Favre, its acting head, drafted a hasty dispatch for Gambetta reporting a successful crossing of the Marne, as well—
en passant
—as the capture of Épinay. Two balloons, one propitiously called the
Bataille de Paris
, the other Jules
Favre No. 2
, were standing by to carry this vital message, so that for once there would be no delay in informing Tours. Strong and favourable winds wafted. both balloons swiftly to the west, but disaster nearly overtook the Jules Favre No. 2 when it was blown out over the Brittany coast. With great luck the pilot managed to make a crash landing in Belle-Île, ripping off in his descent the roof of a house which, by the wildest of coincidences, belonged to no other than the brother of
Trochu himself. According to Henry Vizetelly of the
Illustrated London News
, his mother, aged eighty-four had been ‘praying during the night for some sign from heaven that her son would yet save France, and she had interpreted the noise of the crashing rafters in a favourable sense.’ The crew of the balloon were badly injured, but by the evening following its dispatch the news from Paris was in Gambetta’s hands. His hopes were raised no less high than Mme Trochu’s had been, and with as little justification. Of Épinay Gambetta had never heard, but on glancing at the map his eye at once lit upon an Épinay-sur-Orge, a few kilometres south of Orly. Joy of joys! This must mean not only that Ducrot had broken out across the Marne but that he was now well on his way to the rendezvous at Fontainebleau. Issuing a dramatic order of the day, he instructed his generals, Aurelle and Chanzy, to march on Fontainebleau post-haste, without pausing to concentrate. Thus it came about that the amateur strategist allowed himself to commit one of the deadliest sins known to the professional—the division of his forces. And meanwhile the most professional of Moltke’s army commanders, Prince Frederick-Charles, had arrived from Metz and was all set to strike his first blow against the Army of the Loire.

The casualties for that one day, though smaller than during the great battles of the summer, had been painfully heavy. The French had lost, by Ducrot’s reckoning, 5,236 men, 4,000 of these around Villiers and Cœuilly alone, and the Germans 2,091. That night smart clubs on the Champs-Élysées and humble
bistros
alike mourned many a friend who had dined there only a few nights earlier. The commander of II Corps, old General Renault, who had seen half a century’s service, received his forty-fifth wound; his leg was amputated and after four days of delirium in which he raved constantly against Trochu, he died. One of the brigade commanders on Bowles’s front, La Charrière, had also been hit three times, and the third proved mortal. Colonel Franchetti, Ducrot’s most spirited cavalry leader, had been wounded by a stray shell, and died shouting deliriously, ‘Follow me, my friends! It’s hard, but we’ll get there.
Vive la France!
’ Captain de Neverlée, Ducrot’s emissary on October 31st, who had informed his friends on the eve of battle that he would not survive the morrow, fell gallantly before Villiers; and somewhere on the battlefield the mysterious, heroic commando Sergeant Hoff was missing. Ducrot, seen constantly galloping in front of the Prussians with a mad frenzy as if, knowing he could not return ‘victorious’, he were seeking a stray bullet, had had at least one horse killed under him. Trochu too experienced several miraculous escapes.

All day the wounded had streamed back before the eyes of the
shocked Parisians, with faces bearing (said Goncourt) ‘the horrible anxiety of their wounds, the uncertainty of amputation, the uncertainty of life or death’. They came in files of blood-bedaubed horse-drawn buses and in
bateaux-mouches
that deposited them on the
quais
of the Seine. Owing to the primitiveness of surgery in those days, exacerbated by the traditional ineptitude and squalor of French military hospitals, the badly-wounded knew they could rarely look forward to a happy outcome of their suffering. The plight of the wounded at the front was particularly appalling. Chaos among the ambulances had not helped. Felix Whitehurst, a British voluntary worker, noted that many had been sent out so full of attendants that there was room for only one casualty in each, and that at Champigny there had been such a jam as to prevent them deploying on to the field. Then there had been a disgraceful muddle over linen urgently required for 1,500 wounded at Nogent; Whitehurst had gone into Paris and, after a three-hour wrestle with French bureaucracy, got it—only to find on his return that the wounded had been moved on elsewhere. A French staff officer admitted to him that it ‘beats the worst mess of the worst days of the Crimea’. The
Daily Telegraph
corrrespondent recorded handing his cherished reserve of chocolate to a wretched casualty who had lain all night without receiving food, soup, or medical care, and many of the wounded whom it had been impossible to collect had been left out on the battlefield overnight, their wounds freezing in the sudden bitter cold. Prussian outposts were astonished to see French soldiers apparently more concerned to strip the horse carcasses of their last ounce of flesh, and root up a forgotten cabbage here and there, than to carry in their fallen comrades.

Among the numerous ambulances (including those staffed by Americans and Britons, about which more will be said shortly) involved in this work of mercy, a colourful figure was to be found on the battlefield: Monseigneur Bauer, Archbishop of Syracuse and Chaplain-General to the Army. His had been an unusual career; born a Hungarian Jew, involved as a young man in the 1848 uprising in Vienna, he had then taken orders. In 1868, by now a naturalized Frenchman, he became Empress Eugénie’s personal confessor, and it was he who had blessed the Suez Canal. Renowned even during the Second Empire for gallantry of a distinctly un-ecumenical flavour, Mgr. Bauer ended up some thirty years later once again a layman, defrocked, and married to a beautiful young Jewish artist. Despite his links with the deposed regime, he enjoyed great popularity with the troops; possibly on account of his Rabelaisian qualities, as well as his considerable courage. On the Marne battlefield the prelate presented
an admirable, but incongruous, figure; prancing about on horseback in long purple boots and breeches, with a broad-brimmed ecclesiastical hat on his head, a large gold crucifix and a diamond-studded order around his neck, and a huge episcopal ring on his finger. At his side rode a mounted ‘bodyguard’ of four ecclesiasts equally bizarre in their trappings, a standard-bearer holding aloft a banner with a large Red Cross, and under his command were several hundred lay
Frères Chrétiens
acting as stretcher-bearers. Tirelessly, and quite contemptuous of the Prussian bullets that came his way, he rode about the field directing the succour of the wounded. ‘He is’, said Labouchere (though it must have been second-hand, as that distinguished correspondent had not stirred far from his quarters in the Grand Hôtel during the battle) ‘as steady under fire as if he were in a pulpit’.

But all the efforts of Mgr. Bauer and the various ambulances could not suffice to bring in more than a tithe of the agonizing wounded. The army was low on ammunition and it was clear to Ducrot that it was in no condition to renew the offensive, so on December 1st a twenty-four hour truce to remove the wounded was requested, and granted. Meanwhile the Prussians were preparing a massive counter-attack. They unleashed it the following morning, even before it was fully light. Ducrot was at his battle H.Q. giving orders to the chief of the
Ambulances de la Presse
, Ferdinand de Lesseps of Suez fame, when the cannonade broke out. Quickly he mounted his horse and rode off towards it. On the road to Champigny he met ‘an avalanche of vehicles, infantrymen, cavalry, all descending at full speed towards the Marne’. Somehow he managed to stop their flight, but the spectacle he found at Champigny itself was even more depressing; ‘… the Grande Rue is full of
Mobiles
, and soldiers of all arms, running in every direction; a ration convoy trying to advance adds still further to the disorder, the confusion;… words, exhortations, threats have no effect at all on this torrent of fugitives forever increasing…’ With awful regularity shells from Prussian big guns fell amid this tangle, exploding on the granite
pavee
with terrible effect. Bowles, who was once again on the spot, could find no other word for it than ‘a perfect rout’. Later, other French units managed to stage a rally and all day desperate fighting continued. But the next morning, under cover of a fog and the cannons of St.-Maur, Ducrot’s army evacuated its bridgeheads to recross the Marne.