The Greater Journey

by David McCullough

  In mid-October, Washburne was struck ill by what he called his “old Galena ague,” great dizziness and violent vomiting. Two days later, on October 15, he was still “suffering … so sore I can hardly move … cold feet and ague pains in my limbs …” But he refused to give in. On October 17 he was back at his office “quite early” and “busy all day.”

  Many people called. At noon went to the prison [of Saint-Lazare] to see the poor German women. I found seventy-four of them imprisoned for no offense except being Germans. … I have made arrangements to have them all released tomorrow and shall have them cared for till the siege is over.

  Pressure on him to get people out of Paris grew greater. Under the new government of Paris, the Government of National Defense, General Louis Trochu was at its head, and Jules Favre served as minister of foreign affairs. Trochu refused to permit anyone to leave the city for any reason for fear of a demoralizing effect on the army.

  “But Washburne,” wrote Wickham Hoffman, “was not a man to sit down quietly under a refusal in a matter like this.” He went directly to Trochu’s headquarters at the Louvre and after an “interminable gabble” of three hours, in which Jules Favre also took part, Trochu relented. So on October 27 a caravan of nineteen carriages piled high with baggage departed from the city under military escort carrying forty-eight Americans—men, women, and children—and twenty-one others with passes provided by Minister Washburne.

  He had wanted to ride with them as far as the German lines and see them safely delivered, but was suffering “the ague” still and, he had to confess, “a little depression of spirits” from so long a separation from his family. Instead, he sent Hoffman and his son Gratiot.

  “We drove to the French outposts, and thence sent forward the flag with an officer of Trochu’s staff,” wrote Hoffman.

  While we waited, a German picket of six men advanced toward us, dodging behind the trees, muskets cocked, and fingers on trigger. I confess I was not much impressed with this specimen of German scouting. It looked too much like playing at North American Indian. … The necessary arrangements having been made, we proceeded to the German outposts. Here the Prussian officers verified the list, calling the roll name by name, and taking every precaution to identify the individuals. I heard afterward, however, that a Frenchman of some prominence had escaped disguised as a coachman.

  The Americans now remaining in Paris numbered no more than 150.

  On October 31, Trochu’s army launched another attack on the Germans, this time at the village of Le Bourget, in an attempt to enlarge the perimeter of Paris. The attack seemed to have succeeded at first and in Paris was immediately proclaimed a resounding victory. But then it turned out to be a horrendous failure.

  That same day, to compound the shock of disappointment, came official word that at the French stronghold of Metz, east of Paris, which had been holding out until now, a French army of over 170,000 men had surrendered. To make matters inconceivably worse, rumors spread that at the Hôtel de Ville that morning Trochu and his Government of National Defense were secretly discussing the surrender of Paris.

  It was Halloween, and as Washburne wrote in his diary, events “marched with gigantic strides.”

  A shouting crowd of workers and citizen soldiers marched on the Hôtel de Ville—angry over any talk of an armistice and determined to save Paris. Washburne was busy all day at the legation, but his friend Nathan Sheppard joined the throngs who converged to see what was happening. “People, and people, and people hurrying to the Hôtel de Ville,” Sheppard wrote, “… ten thousand, fifteen thousand … packing all the vast open space before the palace, and all the streets emptying into it.”

  Women with big feet and ankles of prodigious circumference; maidservants in their clean white caps; boys as frolicsome as only boys can be, playing hide-and-seek among the forest of legs, followed by small dogs in full bark; old men, who totter as they hasten. … Mobiles and Nationals in half uniform and full uniform, full-armed and half-armed—in they pour and here they gather, and shout, and squeeze, and sway. …

  Placards and banners proclaimed NO ARMISTICE! RESISTANCE TO DEATH! VIVE LA RéPUBLIQUE, VIVE LA COMMUNE.

  A tall well-bred-looking gentleman, in officer’s undress uniform, ventures to deplore such factious behavior, and looks down haughtily on the ruffians who hustle up around him with menacing faces and fingers. But he folds his arms and continues to look formidable to his tormentors, who gradually skulk before his cool disdainful eye. …

  Delegations wedge their way through to the iron gates [of the Hôtel]. … The clock over the entrance chimes the quarter-hour. The pleasant melody is sadly out of keeping with the angry and vindictive shouts. … The gates come open. The crowd pours in. … There is a parley with the sentinels, who give way. Shots are fired, by whom, at whom, no one knows. … Ten thousand people run hither and thither crying, “To arms! To arms! They are attacking the Government. They are firing on the people.” Now a spectacle of panic, stampede, and lunacy such as only Paris can furnish.

  Inside the Hôtel de Ville, the insurgent “Red Paris” seized control of the government. On hearing what was happening, Washburne left the legation and reached the Hôtel de Ville at about six o’clock. Forcing his way through the crowd, he succeeded in getting inside the Hôtel only to find mostly National Guard soldiers wandering about carrying their muskets upside down, the sign of peace. “They all seemed to regard the revolution as an accomplished fact, which was only to be ratified by a vote of the people of Paris.” So Washburne departed, thinking “a genuine Red Republic” was a fait accompli. “God only knows what is yet in store for this unhappy country,” he wrote that night in his diary.

  But the uprising melted away as rapidly as it began. By the next day Trochu and the Government of National Defense were back in place. “What a city!” concluded Washburne. “One moment revolution, and the next the most profound calm!”

  To add to his troubles, more and more British citizens were descending on him, “perfectly raving” to have learned that through his efforts so many Americans had slipped out of Paris while they were left behind. But by this time Bismarck had informed Washburne there would be no further passports granted to anyone. The exit door was closed.

  III

  The rumble of distant cannon remained an everyday presence. Wounded soldiers kept arriving at the city’s hospitals and the American Ambulance, a field hospital. There was much talk of holding out at all costs and “dying to the last man”; still, overall the adjustment of the populace remained surprisingly, admirably smooth.

  The great majority of the people believed the defenses of the city were impregnable, and in Washburne’s opinion, they had reason to feel secure. He had made several tours of miles of the outer defenses, and was amazed. He had seen many forts and immense earthworks during the Civil War, but these were “a prodigy of strength and wonder,” he recorded. “Indeed, the defenses all round the city present a spectacle without parallel in the whole world.” The entire defense circle was manned by troops of the regular army, and by French sailors who were in charge of the cannon. Washburne could conceive of nothing “so complete.” “I do not see for the life of me, how the city can be taken by assault.”

  Though all private building construction had been halted in the city in order to concentrate on defenses, there was no shortage of work. Small shops were busier than ever making war materials. Department stores, theaters, hotels, and public buildings had been turned into hospitals. Flags of the Red Cross flew from the rooftops of the Grand Hôtel, the Comédie Française, the Palais Royal, and the Palais de Justice. Architect Charles Garnier’s still-uncompleted Opera House served as a military supply depot. The Orléans railroad station had been converted into a balloon factory.

  At the Louvre, where Trochu established his headquarters, windows were covered with sandbags. Paintings and statuary had been boxed up and carried away for safekeeping. In the great galleries, instead of painters quietly at work at their easels ma
king copies, one saw and heard gunsmiths at workbenches noisily converting old muskets into breechloaders.

  In a city cut off from all news from the outside, there were more newspapers being published than ever—thirty-six or more—and representing every shade of political opinion. Hungry for news of almost any kind, Parisians now read newspapers as they walked down the streets. Yet at the same time there seemed even less faith that much of anything published could be trusted for accuracy.

  At first all theaters were closed, but when the Comédie Française reopened, with productions using no sets or costumes, a few others followed. Restaurants and cafés remained open, but only until ten at night. Supplies of bread were still plentiful and cheap, but not meat. Reportedly 50,000 horses or more were to be slaughtered before long. Horse-drawn cabs and carriages were growing noticeably fewer in number. But dining on cats and dogs was as yet spoken of only in jest.

  Paris continued taking things in stride. Little if any outspoken complaining was to be heard. The crime rate dropped significantly.

  For the American population, though they were but a tiny fraction of the total, the hard truth of their lot was little different from the rest. “The situation here is dreadful,” wrote Washburne, summing things up on November 12. “The Prussians can’t get into Paris and the French can’t get out.” Nor did it help that the weather had turned damp and raw. “Nothing of interest today,” he recorded on November 22. “Raining outside—cold, cheerless, dreary …” When he took time off to sit for a portrait, the photographer told him his expression was “too sober.”

  “Oh, for an opportunity to escape!” wrote Nathan Sheppard, who to fill the time walked the city at all hours. “One felt an intense desire to have one’s capacity for hearing, seeing, and comprehending increased a hundredfold, to be enabled to be everywhere at once, and to miss not one phase of the situation.” He was annoyed only by the “furtive glances” he encountered, the suspicion of any and all “étrangers” as spies. On the Champs-Élysées one evening, he and two other Americans were arrested on the charge of talking in a foreign tongue.

  Worst of all, he wrote, was the mental strain, the ennui:

  It is the intolerable tension of expectation and the baffling uncertainty that besets every hour and minute of the day which tries us. One really knows nothing of what is going on, and there is an all-pervading sense of something that is going to happen, and which may come at any moment. This gives a sense of unreality to one’s whole life.

  Anything more dreary than the boulevards in the evening would be difficult to imagine, wrote London’s Daily News correspondent Labouchère. Only one streetlamp in three was lighted, and the cafés were on half-allowances of gas.

  For many not the least of troubles was severe insomnia. An American physician from Pennsylvania named Robert Sibbet, who had come to Paris expecting to attend lectures at the École de Médecine just as the École closed its doors in the emergency, found himself “overtaken” with insomnia and reported many others suffering in the same way. The worst of it was the cannonading. “The cannonading produces a decided effect upon nervous constitutions.” Many nights he could not sleep at all, not even for an hour.

  The American medical student Mary Putnam had the advantage, she said, of something to do of overriding importance to her. She concentrated on her academic work, and on tending the sick and wounded at the Hôpital de la Pitié. The steadily diminishing supply of food, the inconveniences, bothered her comparatively little. Nor had she any desire to leave.

  She was staying with a French family whose congenial, cultivated company and outlook she greatly enjoyed. Her only pain she seems to have kept to herself. She had fallen in love with another medical student, a young Frenchman, and they had become engaged. But he had gone to the front to serve. She refused to brood or complain. She had set herself to completing her thesis by the end of the year. Her chosen topic was “De la Graisse Neutre et des Acides Gras” (“Natural Fat and Fatty Acids”). It was the last hurdle to her becoming the first American woman to be graduated from the École de Médecine.

  “It is not at all probable that the war will last until December,” she had written to her mother on the eve of the siege, “and if school opens then I have all I need.” She had offered her services to the doctors at the American Ambulance, but was told they had more volunteers than they had places for.

  With the passage of days the toll of disease—and especially of smallpox—mounted steadily. In the first week of the siege 158 people died of smallpox. By the fourth week the number exceeded 200. By the eighth week, 419 would die of the disease.

  After nearly two months of siege, the gas that made Paris the City of Light finally gave out, along with food and firewood. An order appeared that instead of only one in three streetlamps lighted at night, it would now be one in six.

  As darkness fell earlier and more heavily, Washburne found himself thinking increasingly of life at home in Galena and such examples of fortitude as he had grown up with in the Maine of his boyhood. On November 18 he noted in his diary that it was his father’s eighty-sixth birthday, and that it would not be long before his father and the last of the settlers of Livermore were all gone.

  And what a class of men they were [he wrote], distinguished for intelligence, nobility, honor, thrift, illustrating their lives by all these virtues which belong to the best type of the New England character. … And here in this far off, besieged city, in these long and dismal days, I think of them all. …

  To Parisians it came as no surprise that they would still, in the face of everything and in large numbers, turn out for a Sunday stroll on the boulevards, quite as though they had not a care, and especially if the sun were shining, as it was on Sunday, November 20. “The sun was just warm enough for comfort,” Nathan Sheppard noted. “The atmosphere was kindly.” He saw nothing dejected in the look of the crowd. “On the contrary, nothing could be more indicative of the satisfaction and contentment than the faces of the people under the genial November sun. They were each and every one the picture of self-congratulation.” Shoes were polished, children “sportive.” At one of the public concerts, a young lady who had performed beamed when she received, instead of a bouquet of flowers, a generous portion of cheese.

  In the meantime, the cattle and sheep that had filled the Bois de Boulogne were to be seen no more. Horsemeat had become the mainstay of Paris. And all knew there was worse to come. “They are arriving down to what we call in the Galena mines the hard pan,” Washburne wrote, referring to the part all but impossible to drill.

  Because the German command continued to grant him the privilege of receiving by diplomatic pouch news from the outside world, he was in a position like that of no one else. No newspapers from elsewhere got into Paris except those that came to the American Legation. But he could also send out written correspondence and so felt he must report what he knew as responsibly and accurately as possible. When time allowed, he tried to get out and see all he could of what was happening, hoping in this way that he might be better able to forecast what was to come. But could anyone predict how Paris would respond under such circumstances? There seemed no telling with the French. So much that they did seemed such a contradiction. “With an improvised city government, without police, without organization,” he recorded in the last week of November, “Paris has never been so tranquil and never has there been so little crime. …”

  The radical political clubs had begun to “agitate” again. “Hunger and cold will do their work,” he wrote. But whatever the given situation, he reported to Washington, no one could tell how soon it might all change.

  The American Ambulance, the large, well-equipped field hospital established by Thomas Evans and others at the start of the war, had proven a tremendous success and a source of pride for every American who knew anything about it. At its head were two American physicians, Dr. John Swinburne, the chief surgeon, and Dr. W. E. Johnston, the physician-in-chief, assisted by several additional American doctors an
d nearly forty American volunteers, including Gratiot Washburne.

  Of the many hospitals and ambulances throughout the city, it was the only tent encampment, intended specifically to provide as much fresh air as possible. “Here were order, system, and discipline,” wrote Wickham Hoffman. The work went on without stop in all weather.

  To warm the large tents in cold weather a trench had been dug the length of each on the inside and a pipe laid to carry heat from a coal stove set in a hole at one end of the tent on the outside. Thus the ground was dried and warmed, and this warmed the whole tent. It was a solution devised during the Civil War and it worked perfectly. No patient in the American Ambulance was to suffer from the cold. “I have known the thermometer outside to be 20 degrees Fahrenheit, while in the tents it stood at 55 degrees,” wrote Hoffman.

  Swinburne, a battlefield surgeon in the Civil War, had been traveling in France when the Franco-Prussian War broke out and had stayed in Paris to serve. He spoke perfect French, seemed never to sleep, and was admired by everybody. He and Dr. Johnston both served without remuneration.

  “Is it necessary that we should dwell upon the scrupulous cleanliness of this ambulance, or the assiduous care [with] which our wounded are treated?” asked an editorial in the Électeur Libre, adding that it was “truly touching” to see these foreigners “giving themselves up without reserve to this humane work.” The surgeon general of the French Army told Elihu Washburne he thought the American hospital superior to anything the French had.

  On December 1, following yet another futile French assault launched on the German lines, Washburne stood in the cold of the afternoon watching as the wounded, numbering more than a hundred, were hauled to the tents of the ambulance by the carriage load. Gratiot had been with the volunteers who went to the battlefield to help. One soldier had died in Gratiot’s arms.