The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (38 page)

To begin with, at Versailles, chosen more for reasons of prestige than of strategy, the Prussian High Command felt itself constantly menaced, with the least French activity to the west of Paris capable of causing panic. Then, as long as there were substantial French armies at large in the provinces and another army intact in Paris, Prussian minds would be nagged by the fear of being caught between two fires. In early November, when Aurelle was registering his initial successes round Orléans, there had been serious talk at Moltke’s headquarters of raising the Siege of Paris. Complaining of ‘the inexpressibly distressing manner in which the operations of our armies are being conducted’, von Blumenthal wrote at the time that ‘the King fancies our own position in front of Paris to be extremely hazardous and will not sanction any troops being sent away. I have not been so depressed
for a long time.’ The prospect of having to lift the blockade was again voiced, briefly, during Ducrot’s attempt to break out at the end of November. On December 16th, when Faidherbe was active round Amiens, the Crown Prince, who shared to the full his father’s gloom about the way the war was going, entered in his diary: ‘It looks more and more as though our military situation is once more to become critical in the north, as it already is in the south…. His Majesty’s outlook on the immediate future is of the blackest….’ The recuperative powers of the French, as exploited by Gambetta, repeatedly dismayed him: ‘It is positively amazing how quickly, after an Army has been beaten and put to flight, ever fresh masses of men are again got together and armed, which in their turn fight well.’ Perhaps the most realistic fear of the Crown Prince was of a French flying column slashing the besieging army’s tenuous link with its rear. It was a fear by no means limited to him alone: ‘What would happen’, speculated Dr. Busch anxiously as late as mid-December, after Faidherbe had pointed the way by cutting (temporarily) the railway from Reims to Amiens, if the French with 300,000 men from the south-east were fall on the thin line of our communications with Germany? We might then easily be compelled even to give up Paris.’ To a military historian it does seem astonishing that Gambetta did not think of such an operation until so late in the war—far too late, as will be seen shortly.

It was not only the French defenders who suffered from the phenomenal cold that struck in December. Even from the comparative luxury of Bismarck’s quarters, Dr. Busch wrote ‘in spite of the big beech logs which were burning in my fireplace, I could not get reasonably warm in my room…’ and a fortnight later Russell was complaining that he was ‘shrivelled up with cold’. How much worse it was for the men in the line can be imagined. The funeral ceremonies at Versailles became increasingly frequent, noted Russell, as more and more of the German wounded succumbed. By January, the sick list had reached thirty to forty men per company, and sometimes higher. With the fall in health, morale showed an alarming decline too. General von Stosch had reflected the expectations of every German private when he wrote home on November 23rd: ‘I think that we shall be home by Christmas.’ But, like MacArthur in Korea, he was to be sadly disappointed. A bitter Christmas came and went, with the troops still entrenched round Paris and the end of the war no nearer in sight. Daily the official communiqués repeated a formula that would become extremely familiar to Germans in 1914–18: ‘Nothing new before Paris.’ Photographs of sweethearts and next of kin were getting grubby and well-thumbed. Among his Saxons, Forbes noticed drunkenness sharply increasing.

The protraction of the war was noticeably affecting the leaders too. By November, the King was tormented with recurrent nightmares provoked by anxieties lest the retreat from Orléans might turn into a rout; Blumenthal was suffering badly from some nervous malady, and Bismarck’s health was not improving. As Russell explained in a letter to Lord Carnarvon on January 7th, Bismarck was ‘laid up and had varicose veins united with indiscriminate appetite—beer and champagne—great eating—no exercise—and mental labour.’ To Russell on New Year’s Eve, the Crown Prince ‘expressed the utmost weariness of the war, because it was a useless expenditure of blood and prolonging of misery and suffering to all….’ Even Bismarck was prone to depression. He confided to his wife: ‘The men are freezing and falling sick; the war is dragging out; the neutrals are interfering in our affairs… and France is arming.’ Time no longer seemed to be on the Prussian side. The Crown Prince predicted sombrely:

The longer this struggle lasts, the better for the enemy and the worse for us. The public opinion of Europe has not remained unaffected by the spectacle. We are no longer looked upon as the innocent sufferers of wrong, but rather as the arrogant victors, no longer content with the conquest of the foe, but fain to bring about his utter ruin. No more do the French appear in the eyes of neutrals as a mendacious, contemptible nation, but as the heroic-hearted people that against overwhelming odds is defending its dearest possessions in honourable fight…. Bismarck has made us great and powerful, but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and—our conscience.

Clearly something had to be done to hasten the end of the war, and there now seemed only one way left to achieve this. Bombard Paris into submission! It was a measure which public opinion at home now demanded with mounting impatience. When the Siege began, three courses had presented themselves to the Prussians: to take the city by frontal assault; to starve it out, like Metz; or to pound it with the mighty cannons of Krupp until, like Strasbourg, the civilian population cried for an end. Because of the effectiveness of the permanent fortifications of Paris, and the enormous casualties they could wreak upon an attacking infantry, the first course had never been seriously considered. On October 8th, the Crown Prince had written ‘I count definitely on starving out the city’, and it was a view shared at that time by all factions of Prussian leadership. Two weeks later, after Paris had already given the Prussians their first surprise by their determination to resist, von Blumenthal delivered a detailed appreciation:

I do not think that we can hope for the bombardment of Forts Issy, Vanves, and Montrouge before the 10th of November…. The forts will then have to be bombarded for at least four or five days, sapping pushed on, and batteries established in the second position. The two forts, Issy and Vanves, can then be assaulted by storm on the 1st of December. The real difficulties of the situation will then only begin; namely the attack on the
enceinte
. If we do succeed in capturing the
enceinte
by storm, it could not be before the 1st of January—a result which the mere investment of the fortress should bring about of itself by that date. It is impossible that Paris can be provisioned for so long. I am of the opinion that we ought not to think of a bombardment, but trust entirely to starvation.

Von Blumenthal had submitted his appreciation to Moltke, who ‘agreed with me entirely’ Upon this optimistic and erroneous supposition, Moltke based his strategy, and no priority was attached to preparing a siege train of heavy guns round Paris. His artillery commander, General von Hindersin, had been left behind in Sedan to organize transportation back to Germany of the ‘booty’.

When he did arrive, in the way that military men have of pressing their own wares, von Hindersin immediately began canvassing for an early bombardment of Paris. His case soon gained, for political reasons, the support of Bismarck, followed by that of the King. But no issue was to divide the Prussian leaders with greater acrimony. On the other side, the anti-bombarders comprised the Crown Prince—for humanitarian reasons—and Moltke and most of the generals, with the exception of von Roon whom Bismarck had won over. Moltke’s attitude was purely based on military considerations. Bismarck, in whom a layman’s light-hearted regard for the problems of the military combined with rooted cynicism about French character, gaily reckoned that ‘two or three shells’ would suffice to scare Paris into capitulation, but Moltke—observing the minimal effect that French cannonades obtained upon his own positions—opposed any bombardment until at least 250 heavy guns could be assembled with an initial supply of 500 rounds each. And this effort, declared Moltke, must represent ‘a lead weight tied to the legs of the Army’. There were mountainous logistic difficulties. All four of Moltke’s Armies in France were supplied from a primitive railway network which converged at one bottleneck, Frouard on the Moselle, before linking with a single line to Germany. Only one line fed the forces of investment; even this was unviable until the fortress of Toul fell on September 25th, and daily it was jammed with the immense everyday requirements of a besieging army. Moreover, until Strasbourg and Metz were reduced by the end of October, the 250 heavy guns required for Paris were simply not available.

As October passed and the French showed no signs of surrender, Moltke—as a prudent commander, although maintaining his reservation
—realized he would have to provide for an eventual bombardment. Valuable time had already been lost, and it was obvious that further long delays could not be avoided. Even when the railway had been cleared as far as Nanteuil-sur-Marne, von Blumenthal noted that the Crown Prince’s Army (to whom the burden of the bombardment would principally fall) had fifty-six miles to haul its ammunition, while ‘we have only 600 carts in the siege park, and require at least 1,700’. Roads were so bad that it took the heavily laden waggons as long as nine days to make the return trip between Nanteuil and the siege park set up at Villacoublay, and many collapsed under their loads. With the freeze-up, fresh tribulations arrived. There was also the problem of the range of Herr Krupp’s super-heavy guns, which, with a maximum of 5,600 metres, would reach no farther than the suburbs of Paris, unless the forts to the south of Paris were first silenced and then the guns moved forward again.

On November 20th, Bismarck was relaying vexedly the latest discussion about the bombardment to the sympathetic ears of Dr. Busch; ‘I said to the King once more, so late as yesterday, that it was now full time for it, and he had nothing to say against me. He told me that he had ordered it, but the generals said they were not ready.’ Blumenthal’s account of the same meeting describes him as going so far as to declare to Bismarck ‘that I would rather retire than permit it’. Blumenthal’s nervous twitch was getting markedly worse, and so was Bismarck’s indisposition. On the 28th, the latter grumbled to Busch: ‘If they would give me the command-in-chief for four-and-twenty hours… I should give just one order-“fire!”… If we had only begun the bombardment four weeks ago, we should in all probability have been by this time in Paris….’ As it was, the eager artillerist, General von Hindersin, had himself been forced to tell Bismarck only a few days previously that the bombardment could, in any case, not begin on January 1st. But meanwhile pressure at home was beginning to make itself felt more and more at Versailles. ‘Make haste and bombard Paris, and have done with it’, O’Shea read in one letter found upon a dead German, and it typified the attitudes of countless German wives and sweethearts. The Press, undoubtedly pepped up by the conniving Bismarck, was now roaring for the final act, and a little jingle made the rounds:

Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm,

Mach doch endlich: Bumm! Bumm! Bumm!

Then, by the second week in December, things had reached such a pitch that a cable arrived from the Governor of Berlin expressing fears of insurrections. With gleeful
Schadenfreude
, Bismarck from his sickbed had the message passed on to the King.

There was an important Council of War on December 17th. Although Bismarck was excluded from it, Moltke had been swung round. The Crown Prince, though now in the minority, still staunchly resisted Bismarck and the generals. His was the sole voice to be raised pleading on humanitarian grounds within the German camp at that time, and well may one speculate how much happier the fate of twentieth-century Europe might have been, had not an untimely death
¹
wrenched this well-intentioned kindly figure from the German throne, leaving it instead to his son, young Wilhelm II. Even the policy of starving Paris into submission had disturbed him, and in his diaries he reveals himself to have been constantly worrying about the fate of the children in the city. As the threat of the bombardment drew closer, Russell wrote in a letter to Lord Carnarvon how the Crown Prince had confided to him: ‘I pass sleepless hours when I think of the women and children’; and as the guns actually blazed out he was to be tortured by the recent discovery ‘that at Strasbourg, as a result of the siege, a hospital for children who have lost limbs has had to be established’. But on December 17th the victory was once again Bismarck’s. It was agreed that first of all there should be an experimental bombardment of Mont Avron, an isolated plateau beyond the line of forts to the east of Paris where the French had established themselves in support of the Great Sortie. If that succeeded, the southern forts would be subjected to an all-out pounding, following which the city itself would become the target. It would begin just as soon as the guns and their ammunition were ready.

* * *

Out beyond Prussian Versailles, in the country still in French hands, Gambetta was persisting in his endeavours to carry on the
guerre à outrance
; even though deprived of the comfort of knowing just what alarm his activities were still capable of provoking at enemy H.Q. But the month of December brought little comfort of any kind. The defeat at Orléans and the failure of the Great Sortie had marked the watershed in the affairs of Gamebtta’s armies, and since then morale had slumped. In many areas, the war had become a broken-backed guerilla affair conducted by irregular
franc-tireurs
, in which atrocities led to savage counter-atrocities with the civilian population bearing the brunt of Prussian reprisals. There were more and more
cases of Gambetta’s soldiery being refused shelter and support as weariness with the ruinous war grew among the civilians of the provinces. Under the endless miles of dispiriting retreat, the papier-mâché soles of hastily made boots disintegrated, leaving many soldiers barefooted in glacial conditions. They cursed Gambetta when they heard of such optimistic utterances as one telegram sent from Bourges in December: ‘Things are getting better here very fast and a few days from now you will hear news of us. Fine cigars, keep cheerful….’ Corruption was rife among the generals—one was noted for setting up his headquarters in a local brothel—and discipline in many units was non-existent. As the Crown Prince remarked, ‘It is typical of the French how, so long as the struggle lasts, even when they are in the field against their will, they always fight bravely, but directly it is all over they throw to the winds, so to speak, all that is generally expected of soldiers.’ Woes beset Gambetta on every side. Bakunin the anarchist had made an appearance in Lyons, over which for a brief time the Red Flag had flown and a Commune presided; in Marseilles on October 31st, an adventurer called Cluseret who had fought in the American Civil War had carried out a revolt rather more successfully than Flourens in Paris; there were uprisings in various parts of the south, all of which had to be quelled. Finally, the Prussian advance had forced Gambetta to take the humiliating step of evacuating his ‘Government’ from Tours to Bordeaux, thereby creating a precedent to be followed in two successive wars.