One of the few to try to dodge conscription was Gide’s young publisher friend who had turned down Proust, Gaston Gallimard, who feigned illness until it induced real sickness and he was declared unfit for service. But in general few young Frenchmen stayed at home as embusqués (shirkers); the vast majority, with sober determination and a welling up of patriotism, joined the colours. Overnight the Gare de l’Est became the busiest and most crowded place in Paris, with a steady flow of soldiers marching towards it singing:
C’est l’Alsace et la Lorraine …
C’est l’Alsace qu’il nous faut!
Behind them rumbled batteries of the much vaunted soixante-quinze, with their long and narrow barrels the pride of the French army, which was going to smash the enemy to the east. There were also many detachments of foreign volunteers marching under banners with such slogans as “Greeks who love France,” “Romania rallies to the Mother of the Latin Races,” “Italy whose freedom was bought with French blood” and “British volunteers for France.”
Among those to rush to the colours at the earliest possible moment were many members of the Dreyfus family, which had suffered so much at the hands of the army. Alfred’s son Pierre fought in the first battles of 1914 as a corporal and ended the war a captain. The disgraced and rehabilitated Alfred himself, still in the army though aged fifty-five, repeatedly requested to be sent to the front and was finally permitted to take part as a gunner in the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of 1917.
Suddenly Paris was a deserted city. The streets were empty; there were no buses, only a few trams with women conductors. Theatres and cinemas were closed; cafés shut promptly at 8 p.m., restaurants at 9:30. At the Louvre, as in 1870, art treasures were crated up; iron shutters came down on many a shop. One merchant chalked up on his closed shop, “Sleep peacefully, your mattress-maker is at the front!” Other shops promised to reopen in September—when it would all be over. On 20 August, Lord Bertie made a trip out to the Bois, which he found “all so quiet and peaceful, and I thought of all the horrors going on in Belgium.” At night the beauty of la ville lumière was muted by the black-out, with Proust lamenting the quiet capital under the “unchanged antique splendour of a moon cruelly, mysteriously serene, which poured the useless beauty of its light on monuments that were still intact.” Under moonlight, the Champs-Elysées, flooded with a blue-green sheen, seemed to some “like a hallowed wood,” while the silvery Seine took on a strange beauty all of its own. The night-time Paris defences were tested by sporadic raids of German planes, (ironically called Tauben—or Doves), where Blériot had shown the way only five years previously. The Tauben, and later the weightier Zeppelins, would cause only pinpricks of damage and few casualties, but—as with Teutonic “frightfulness” and terror-weapons in earlier wars, as well as a later one—all the raids on Paris did was to stiffen resolve and make the war more terrible and more prolonged. How far it all seemed from the carefree days of the Belle Epoque!
Older Parisians, or those with a sense of history, who could recall the diet of rats in 1870, laid in extensive stocks of food. Everywhere in the city small workshops manufacturing weapons began to spring up, as they had in 1870. Meanwhile, at the beginning of August the painter Maurice Vlaminck took a tram out to Porte Maillot on the western outskirts of the city, where he found that the Governor of Paris:
had taken strong measures to defend the capital. A dozen or so big trees had been cut down and were laid across the Avenue de Neuilly with a view to stopping German cavalry; palisades and iron spikes set in timber were erected in the streets. As I looked at this improvised defence system I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But would the Kaiser’s grey-clad hordes really arrive to besiege Paris again? What were their intentions? And what were the plans of the French General Staff?
MILITARY DISASTER
As the spectre of German militarism had grown more menacing from the Agadir Crisis of 1911 onwards, the damage caused in the French army by l’affaire and Emil Combes had been repaired with almost miraculous speed. Raymond Poincaré, a staunch revanchist from Lorraine who would never allow himself to forget his childhood memories of Pickelhauben occupying his homeland, had been elected president, and the country was wholeheartedly behind him. When the Union Sacrée coalition was formed to prosecute the war, all politicians, even the left-wing pacifists, backed it in a display of loyalty and unity that had not been seen in France since Napoleon I (nor was it to be seen again in the Third, Fourth or even Fifth Republic). In 1914, the Chief of the Sûreté could remark confidently, “The workers will not rise; they will follow the regimental bands.”
Morale had never been higher. The proportion of defectors on mobilization, previously expected to reach 13 per cent, in fact turned out to be less than 1.5 per cent, but an exaggerated notion pervaded the army of 1914 that the furia francese, the élan vital of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, would somehow suffice to repel and defeat the attacking Germans. “You talk to us of heavy artillery. Thank God, we have none. The strength of the French army is in the lightness of its guns,” the General Staff told the Deputies in 1909. Thus, by August 1914, the whole French army possessed only 300 heavy guns, the Germans 3,500. The French were not over-impressed by the new, deadly machine gun either. In 1910, General Foch, then Commandant of the Staff College, was among those who had reckoned on a short, brutal conflict that would be over in weeks. Meanwhile, to ensure that the enemy should see them and be intimidated by their onrushing numbers, the infantry went to war in the blue képis and surcoats and red trousers of the nineteenth century, despising the Germans for changing to the less romantic, more practical Feldgrau.
Under General Joseph Joffre, France’s portly Commander-in-Chief, the French forces were committed to Plan XVII. This prescribed that, on the outbreak of war, four out of five armies, totalling 800,000 men, would surge forward—predictably—towards the lost territories, their objective the Rhine. Well informed of all this, the Germans wedded themselves to their Schlieffen Plan. Swinging down through neutral Belgium (the casus belli for Britain entering the war on France’s side), the Germans planned a vast right hook which would sweep around behind Paris, and then pin the French armies that were attacking eastwards up against the Swiss frontier. Under Schlieffen’s blueprint (drawn up some years before the war) Germany intended to knock France out in one mighty blow, before the Russian “steamroller” could start rolling. Speed was essential, and there would be no room for any mistakes. Her plan was likened to a revolving door, and under their own Plan XVII the French army would add momentum to the door’s rotation—thereby doing exactly what Schlieffen wanted. Fortunately for France, unfortunately for Germany, Schlieffen’s successor, Moltke—nephew of the man who had crushed France in 1870, but possessing none of his military genius—tampered with the master plan, weakening the impact of both the crucial right wing and the covering force facing the Russians.
As the grey-clad regiments advanced energetically through little Belgium and into France, aware of their strength and confident in the superiority of their race, young Frenchmen lusting for revenge were marching up at a rapid staccato pace. They ripped up the frontier posts in Alsace and sent them to be laid upon the grave of Déroulède. Then the enemy was located. The trumpeters sounded the call that sent a thrill more heady than wine through French veins:
Y a la goutte à boire là-haut!
Y a la goutte à boire!
All along the frontier the infantrymen in their red trousers, carrying heavy packs and long, unwieldy bayonets, broke into the double behind their white-gloved officers. Many sang the Marseillaise. In the August heat, the heavily encumbered French attacked in some sections from a distance of nearly a kilometre from the enemy. Never had machine-gunners had such a target. The French stubble-fields became transformed into gay carpets of red and blue. Splendid cuirassiers in glittering breastplates from the age of Murat hurled their horses hopelessly at the machine guns that were slaughtering the infantry. It was horrible,
and horribly predictable.
PARIS THREATENED—AGAIN
Throughout August it looked as if the Schlieffen Plan was going to work. For days—due partly to stringent censorship, partly to la bavure (administrative cock-up) and partly to the speed of the German advance, Parisians were kept alarmingly in the dark about exactly where the advancing Germans were, especially as the official bulletins kept reporting great French victories in the east. But when they started mentioning the Somme Parisians began seriously to worry. Then came the tragic cartloads of desperate refugees, anxiously interrogated by Parisians about their provenance, each day arriving from villages that much closer to the capital. Where were the German armies heading? As in 1870, it had to be assumed—Paris.
Suddenly German outriders were popping up to capture the racing stables at Chantilly, just forty kilometres north-east of Paris; one cavalry detachment claimed it could see the Eiffel Tower. Railway stations to the west and south were flooded with Parisians wanting to get out before the enemy arrived. Those who stayed thronged to pray solemnly at the shrine to Sainte Geneviève, entreating her to save Paris from the new Huns, just as she had from their precursors under Attila. Something akin to panic began to grip government offices in the city; according to Adolphe Messimy, the Minister of War, it “painted a livid mask of fear” on the face of ministers. General Hirschauer, in charge of the city’s defence works, told him flatly that they were not ready to be manned. The old 1870 fortifications were in a state of decay, and little had been done to reactivate them since war began. On 13 August, Messimy called in Hirschauer and told him to “expect the German armies to be before the walls of Paris in twelve days.” He added, “Is Paris ready to withstand a siege?” Hirschauer responded with a clear “No.” Worse still, two reserve divisions earmarked for the city’s defence were now switched by Joffre to another threatened part of the front. Messimy rushed to the Elysée to see Poincaré and demand that the Military Governor of Paris—a role filled by the flaccid General Trochu back in 1870—be replaced by a General Joseph Galliéni. Poincaré acceded.
It was an extraordinary, eleventh-hour appointment, prompted by despair, but out of it were to spring the most dramatic—and potentially doom-laden—hours in the whole history of Paris, and ultimately the nation’s most decisive victory of 1914–18.
Galliéni was to prove an inspired, if unlikely, choice as the hero who was to save Paris—and France. He was aged sixty-five, retired from active service and already afflicted by the prostate cancer which would kill him two years later. As a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant just out of Saint-Cyr, he had been captured at Sedan in 1870. An intellectual who studied contemporary military history (much against the trend of the time), he was an elegant, autocratic figure who carried himself like an officer on parade, tall and spare with pince-nez (like Dreyfus) and a bushy grey moustache. To Messimy on the night of his appointment he insisted that Paris could not be defended from within, as it had been in 1870: “What do you give me to defend this immense place enclosing the heart and brain of France? A few territorial divisions and one fine division from Africa. That is nothing but a drop in the ocean.” Instead there would have to be a covering army of three active corps; otherwise he would not accept the post. Messimy thanked him effusively, shook Galliéni’s hand several times, “even kissing me,” recalled Galliéni, and promised that he would do his best.
For the best part of two crucial weeks, however, Galliéni was left Commander of the Armies of Paris without an army. Meanwhile, the Germans were approaching ever closer, and, better informed than the general public, Galliéni and his staff learned with apprehension of the fate of the supposedly impregnable forts that protected the Belgian city of Liège. The German infantry having been repulsed several times with severe losses, General von Ludendorff now brought up a secret weapon, the immense 420mm Big Bertha mortars, developed in secret by Krupp over the previous four years and named after the formidable Krupp heiress—the heaviest siege guns yet deployed. At a range of eleven kilometres they projected a shell weighing over a tonne, with a delayed-action fuse enabling it to explode after penetration of a fort, however heavily protected it might be by thick concrete. Seeing one of the fat black monsters approach, pulled by thirty-six horses, a Belgian deputy for Liège described it as “a piece of artillery so colossal that we could not believe our eyes … It was the Belial of cannons.” Other Belgians thought they looked like “overfed slugs”; but by 16 August all the “impregnable” forts defending Belgium’s biggest city had been reduced to rubble.
What havoc would these monster cannon wreak on la ville lumière? There were justifiable fears that whole quarters of the city would be pulverized by the gigantic shells.* The possibility of Paris falling, or being reduced to eating rats again—or being demolished—was urgently debated. There was no question of it being declared an open city. When, on 30 August, President Poincaré asked Galliéni how long Paris could hold out for, the cold answer came: “Paris cannot hold out and you should make ready to leave as soon as possible.” Ministers, declared Galliéni, were “no longer safe in the capital.” Already there was the danger of Uhlans penetrating and cutting the city off from the south. This time, it was argued, France was fighting as part of an alliance and it was the government’s duty to remain in contact with the Allies, as well as with the rest of France. One new Socialist Minister, Jules Guesde, hotly attacked the bourgeois implications of the government leaving Paris, evoking recollections of the Commune of 1871:
You want to open the gates to the enemy so Paris won’t be pillaged. But on the day the Germans march through our streets there will be shots fired from every window in the working-class quarters. And then I will tell you what will happen: Paris will be burned!
That same evening—as if to underline matters—German Tauben struck at the Quai de Valmy, killing two people, then dropping leaflets to tell Parisians, “There is nothing you can do but surrender,” and warning them that the German army was at their gates, as it had been in 1870.
On 1 September, the eve of the anniversary of Sedan, the outlook for France appeared about as hopeless as it had in 1870. The next day, Galliéni sought out his new command, the Sixth Army. As he drove north to make contact with it, it became apparent how desperately late in the day it was when he passed refugees converging on Paris in flight from oncoming Germans, their faces reflecting terror and despair. At Pontoise, just outside Paris to the north-west, where Monet and Renoir had once painted and where now the 61st and 62nd Divisions promised him by Joffre were coming in, all was in disorder, the troops bloody and tired. Inside the city, the Prefect of Police, on whom he would have to depend for maintaining order, had been in office only an hour. His predecessor had refused to stay behind, resigning “for reasons of health.” Like most Parisians in the know, the American Ambassador, Myron Herrick, saw the “terrible onslaught” of the Germans as being “almost beyond resistance.” He himself had received a warning from the Germans that “whole quarters” of Paris might be destroyed, and that he should leave the city. Determined to stay on, however, he promised Poincaré that he would protect the museums of Paris under the American flag (the U.S. was then still neutral) as being “in the custody of humanity at large.” He had his own courageous plan to save Paris from destruction: “if the Germans reached the outskirts of the city, and demanded its surrender, [he would] go out and talk with their army commander, and, if possible, the Kaiser.”
That night the government left by train for Bordeaux, in the dark and in almost furtive secrecy. Galliéni took leave of the sacked Messimy’s successor as Minister of War, the Socialist Etienne-Alexandre Millerand. He found him in an empty room, the contents of which had already been shipped off. The atmosphere was “lugubrious.” Millerand’s orders to Galliéni were to defend Paris à outrance. “Do you understand, Monsieur le Ministre, the significance of the words à outrance?” asked Galliéni. He explained, “They mean destruction, ruins, dynamiting bridges in the centre of the city.”
Millerand repeated, “À outrance.” It must have been a valediction of extraordinary poignancy, Galliéni recording that he felt “pretty well persuaded, myself, that I was remaining to be killed.”
The next morning he issued a stand-and-die proclamation to Parisians:
ARMY OF PARIS, CITIZENS OF PARIS,
The members of the Government of the Republic have left Paris to give a new impetus to the national defence.
I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the invader.
This mandate I shall carry out to the end.
Paris, September 3, 1914
Military Governor of Paris, Commander of the Army of Paris
Parisian reaction to the departure of the government was predictable. A parody of the Marseillaise made the rounds:
Aux gares, citoyens!
Montez dans les wagons!
Galliéni’s commanders prepared orders to blow up eighty bridges in the region, including those of Paris.
* In August 1944, as Paris was about to fall to the Allies, Hitler—determined to destroy Paris totally—ordered up an even bigger cannon, the giant 600mm Karl, firing a two and a half tonne shell, which had shattered the defences of Sevastopol earlier in the war. Fortunately, it did not arrive on the scene in time.
Seven Ages of Paris Page 44