Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  Alas, Nivelle’s new formula led only to new disasters. Too much talked about in advance, it permitted Hindenburg and Ludendorff to dig in and prepare for it. On 16 April, the French infantry—exhilarated by all they had been promised—left their trenches on the Chemin des Dames with an élan unsurpassed in all their glorious history. By the following day, they had suffered something like 120,000 casualties. The Medical Service, seldom brilliant (in one hospital there were reported to be only four thermometers for 3,500 beds), was completely overwhelmed. In the rear areas, some 200 wounded assaulted a hospital train. Nivelle persisted with his offensive—but he had broken the French army. Men on leave waved red flags and sang revolutionary songs, imported from Russia. They beat up military police and railwaymen, and uncoupled engines to prevent trains leaving for the front. Interceding officers, including at least one general, were set upon.

  On 3 May full-scale mutiny broke out. The 21st Division—which, significantly, had gone through some of the worst fighting at Verdun the previous year—was ordered into battle, but, to a man, it refused. The ringleaders were weeded out, summarily shot or sent to Devil’s Island. But unit after unit followed the 21st, some of them the finest in the French army, and over 20,000 men deserted outright. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the mutiny, however, was that no inkling of it was picked up by German Intelligence until order had been completely restored by the new chief, General Philippe Pétain, the Hero of Verdun. Indeed, almost to the end of the twentieth century, details remained veiled in secrecy. How many brave men were shot summarily can only be guessed, though accounts occasionally surfaced of whole units marched out to quiet sectors of the front and then deliberately shelled by their own artillery. Along with these draconian measures, Pétain—nicknamed “le Médecin de l’Armée”—introduced relatively minor improvements in the French army which had been common to the British forces for most of the war.

  In Paris throughout this grim period there abounded rumours that had previously been submerged of profiteering, conspiracy and treason, espionage and defeatism. Political leaders like Joseph Caillaux were contemplating a compromise peace; while more sinister were the activities of the out-and-out defeatists, ranged around the Bonnet Rouge newspaper and headed by Malvy, a former Minister of the Interior, and of the downright traitors who earned millions of francs from German sources for their work of demoralization. It was not until well into 1917 that the reckoning came: Malvy was sentenced to five years’ banishment, the glamorous spy Mata Hari (possibly innocent, certainly insignificant) shot. Censors fought hard to suppress songs expressing disenchantment, pacifist sentiments, and socialist and revolutionary appeals. Meanwhile the poilus’s war-weariness began to infect Parisian workers. For many of the more privileged denizens of Paris, however, life still continued much as before. Dining at the Ritz with other members of his coterie including Jean Cocteau, Proust watched the first great air-raid on Paris by heavy Gotha bombers. As the warning sirens sounded from the Eiffel Tower, Cocteau chirped, “Someone’s trod on the Eiffel Tower’s toe, it’s complaining.”

  Politically, however, the situation in Paris was dire. The miraculous Union Sacrée collapsed, as the Socialists withdrew their support. There was one hope left: Clemenceau. The stormy petrel of French politics for over forty years, already a grown man and Mayor of Montmartre during the Siege and the Commune, leader of the Radicals, and now an old man of seventy-six, Clemenceau was in himself a kind of one-man committee of public safety. From now on the war would be waged relentlessly and ruthlessly: truly à outrance. In the inimitable words of Winston Churchill, “The last desperate stroke had to be played. France had resolved to unbar the cage and let her tiger loose upon all foes, beyond the trenches or in her midst.” With the arrival of the old Tiger, assisted by Pétain and a redeemed Foch, and backed by the U.S. Expeditionary Force commander General Pershing and his doughboys, everything began to change.

  It was as well for France and the Alliance that there was a Clemenceau waiting in the wings at this juncture in history: 1918 was to see the most dangerous period of the war since 1914. German forces liberated from the east by the collapse of Russia enabled Ludendorff in March 1918 to launch a massive offensive aimed directly at Paris. Astutely Ludendorff struck at the hinge of the French and British armies, tearing a great hole in the British front through which his troops poured to the very gates of Amiens, and to Château Thierry, a hundred kilometres from Paris. Once again Paris lived under threat.

  Then, on 24 March 1918, Lord Bertie recorded a new venture in Teutonic frightfulness. Explosions suddenly occurred in the middle of Paris, without warning and with no aircraft in the sky. Soon they were reckoned to be caused by shells from a super-long-range gun, firing from inside the German lines over 110 kilometres away. Once again, the genius of Herr Krupp had contributed a new hazard to civilization. The first shell landed in the east end, on the Quai de la Seine in the 19th arrondissement. Thereafter they followed at intervals of about half an hour. One shell landed on the Gare de l’Est, killing eight people and injuring another thirteen. “Such a lovely day,” added Lord Bertie.

  Unlike the relatively feeble Prussian cannon of 1870, the Paris Gun was a weapon of sheer terror, unjustified by any urge for retaliation. Clearly the Germans hoped that, coupled with the Ludendorff offensive, the continued bombardment would break the French will to resist. A masterpiece of German technical engineering, the Paris Gun was some thirty-five metres long and weighed 138 tonnes, but accuracy was extremely limited: although, wickedly, the gun was aimed at the Louvre, not a single shot hit this huge target. Even so, on Good Friday, 29 March, a shell struck the church of Saint-Gervais during Mass. Seventy-five people were killed outright and ninety injured, and many more died later. Ambassador Bertie noted that day, “People are getting away from Paris as fast as there is train room for them.” Altogether Herr Krupp’s little toy killed 256 Parisians, and wounded another 620. It would not affect the course of the war, but would certainly harden the peace terms. When the Armistice came, no trace was ever found of the great cannon, though even today pockmarks from the shell can be seen in the austere perpendicular columns of Saint-Gervais, which houses a small commemorative chapel to one of the First World War’s least excusable atrocities.

  Suddenly, and at long last, the fortunes of war swung round. By July the offensive power of Ludendorff’s exhausted armies ran out of steam. With a regenerated Foch declaring “Tout le monde à la bataille,” and supported by fresh American troops, the Allied counter-strokes pushed forward all along the line. On 8 August, Haig’s British army inflicted what Ludendorff admitted was “the black day of the German army.” By early autumn the German line had been rolled back, out of France, out of the territory the Germans had held for the past four years—some of it for nearly fifty years.

  ARMISTICE

  At 11 a.m. on 11 November, all the guns ceased firing. The contrast in mood between the front and the rear in Paris spoke for all the differences that had progressively grown between the two disconnected worlds. “Silent thankfulness” was how a correspondent of The Times described the prevailing sentiment among soldiers up on the line. Further back, “amongst the troops in rest there is more jubilation.” But in Paris carnival reigned. The day had begun cold, misty and gloomy; then the bells started to toll, the celebratory cannon to fire, and with them the dancing—and the crying. As the sun came out, Paris was gripped in a mad whirl of festivity. Civilians and soldiers of all nationalities poured out on to the Concorde, embracing each other, and singing “Madelon! Madelon! Madelon!,” “Tipperary,” “Home, Sweet Home” and a new song recently imported from America, “Over There.” There were rapturous demonstrations in front of the statue to the city of Strasbourg, still draped in black crêpe, and captured German guns were hauled up the Rue de Rivoli. But some of the densest crowds congregated around the Chamber of Deputies, where Clemenceau was expected to speak. There, as the cannon continued to fire outside, the Tiger with the white walrus moustach
e, architect of victory, rose trembling and declaimed, “Let us pay homage to our great dead, who have given us this victory!” The crowds grew and grew as peasants poured in from the countryside. In a display of inter-Allied amity that would barely see out the signing of the Peace Treaty, an American doughboy, a British Tommy and a French poilu were carried down the grands boulevards on the shoulders of the crowd. As the sunset produced a golden glow, Paris “went charmingly off its head,” recorded a Times correspondent. The climax came that evening as Marthe Chenal of the Opéra Comique, clad in a robe of red, white and blue and a black Alsatian cap, sang the Marseillaise to a wildly jubilant crowd from the steps of the Opéra.

  But not everyone was cheering. Women, so many women, were dressed in deep mourning. Proust was lamenting the death of male lovers embodied in the person of “Saint-Loup”; Jean Cocteau the death of his Jean Le Roy; while his friend and colleague Guillaume Apollinaire, who had never entirely recovered from his head wound in 1914, had died of ’flu just two days before the Armistice. Through the happy throngs rattled the hearses, spectres at the feast, bearing away victims of the worst epidemic of ’flu in history. Only in October victims in Paris had been dying at a rate of 350 a day; in the last week of October alone there had been 2,566 such deaths in Paris. Across the globe the deaths from ’flu were to total some forty million—or twice the number of war casualties. When the celebrants of Armistice Day in Paris paused to consider the costs in the grey light of the following day, they counted 1.4 million Frenchmen killed in action, the largest proportion of any of the combatant nations. Adding the civilian and ’flu deaths, France had lost 7 per cent of her population.

  The carnival fever of Armistice Day was all too swiftly followed by a certain disillusion. For a long time, la ville lumière remained even darker than London. After all the wartime restrictions, the authorities were slow to get things going again. By the end of November Paris continued to look, and feel, as if she were still at war. Ration cards remained in force, restaurants and cafés closed early; homes and hotels were freezing from the continuing shortage of fuel. On to this scene there began to arrive VIPs and delegates for the forthcoming Peace Conference. There was King George V, and a swarm of American plenipotentiaries. The Hôtel Crillon was found to be too small for their 1,300-strong delegation, so Maxim’s round the corner in the Rue Royale was annexed to it. Herbert Hoover, the food tsar, who was still not yet forty-five, took over a whole block in the Avenue Montaigne; an unsmiling man, all the time he was in Paris he never once visited the theatre and rarely accepted an invitation to dinner. Acidly Jules Cambon, who had been nominated as one of France’s five delegates to the conference and was dislodged from the commandeered Crillon, complained to his brother Paul, the Ambassador to London, that the foreigners were going “to turn Paris into a bawdy-house.”

  In sharp contrast to these visiting grandees came a sombre reminder of the suffering of the past four years in the shape of the returning prisoners-of-war, described by a French reporter as “in the majority, no longer men but shadows clothed in torn rags, and so thin!” Their main receiving centre was in the Grand Palais of Exposition renown, which had been requisitioned as a hospital since 1914. The sight of these tattered and broken reminders of the war created in Paris a fresh rage for maximum reparations and indemnities from the defeated Germans.

  It was perhaps hardly surprising that the post–Armistice Day cry in Paris was “Plus jamais ça!”

  EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  The Phoney Peace

  Paris is a bitch and … one should not become infatuated with bitches, particularly when they have wit, imagination, experience and tradition behind their ruthlessness.

  ROBERT MCALMON

  PEACE-MAKING

  “My work is finished,” observed an exhausted but triumphant Marshal Foch to Clemenceau on Armistice Day 1918; “… your work is beginning.” It was the understatement of the epoch; the work of drawing up a reasonable peace treaty with the crushed Germans would defeat all those involved in it, not least the old Tiger. Following the convergence on Paris of the swarms of diplomats and officialdom from all twenty-seven Allied countries, the serious work of drafting the treaty began in January 1919—pointedly, with a meeting in the French Foreign Minister’s private office in the Quai d’Orsay; pointedly because from beginning to end it was the French who would endeavour to direct and manipulate the negotiations. “I never wanted to hold the Conference in his bloody capital,” Lloyd George complained later of his wartime ally, and—albeit in the gentler language of the campus—Woodrow Wilson would come to share roughly the same opinion. Lloyd George and Wilson’s powerful adviser Colonel House would have preferred to stage the vital conference in a neutral city, such as Geneva, “but the old man wept and protested so much that we gave way.” And, anyway, where else? After all it was France which had suffered most from the war, and had the greatest call for punishment of the enemy.

  Passers-by gaped as Arabs in “picturesque costume,” Indian rajahs in British khaki “but with flowing native turbans,” Japanese and Chinese, “looking wise and saying nothing,” all debouched on to the Concorde. But as the talks dragged on from week to week, month to month, Parisians’ goodwill towards their former allies understandably evaporated. The new invaders were seen to commandeer scarce food and accommodation, and the best women. One French officer was soon telling Haig’s liaison officer, General Spears, that “he could not wait for the British and the Americans to get out of Paris so it could be a French city again.” On the other hand, Spears recorded U.S. General Tasker Howard Bliss as grumbling that British policy seemed to be “to bolster up for ever the decadent races [that is, the French] against the most efficient race in Europe [the Germans].” Doubtless the outspoken General would not have kept such robust views to himself. Young Harold Nicolson, on the British Foreign Office team, “gathered a vivid impression of the growing hatred of the French for the Americans. The latter have without doubt annoyed the Parisians …” The U.S. authorities, according to Nicolson, were finding it prudent to import their own military police: “There have been some rough incidents.” As delegates would spend their weekends on tourist trips to the lunar landscape of the Somme battlefields, a bitter new song, “Qui a gagné la guerre?,” began to make the rounds.

  The discouragingly swift turnaround in Pariso-American relations was not entirely surprising when one recalls how the most prominent figure of the moment was that of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the name most inextricably bound up with the Treaty of Versailles, and consequently with its disastrous failure. The ascetic, unworldly Princeton professor from a stern Presbyterian background, who (France felt) never really understood the French (or maybe he understood them too well?), was indeed curiously out of sync with la ville lumière. His tendency to lecture from the height of a college podium was not well received by either of his peers, Clemenceau and Lloyd George, who both had a view that their nations too had been involved in a war to make the world safe for democracy. When it came to imposing the sweeping aphorisms of his “Fourteen Points,” Wilson was swiftly made to realize that it was rather easier to impart than to apply instruction. He was certainly no Talleyrand, nor was there any thought of inviting the Germans, as the Congress of Vienna had invited the defeated French, to attend the peace conference before the terms had been drawn up. His arrival in Paris on the morning of 14 December 1918, had been the greatest triumphal progress anyone had ever made there. The alarmingly dense crowds had pushed out into the street the files of troops lining the route taken by him and Clemenceau, so that at various points the presidential carriage could force its way through only with great difficulty.

  The inequalities which war had imposed upon the peace-makers were apparent both within and without the Quai d’Orsay as winter slithered into spring. France had the biggest army in the world, but no money; the U.S. had the money, but no accessible military force; Britain was somewhere in between, but increasingly anxious to withdraw back across the Cha
nnel again as soon as possible. While Germany was quite intact, the shattered skeletons of broken towns across the northern countryside of France glared reproachfully at the peace delegates. As they sojourned in Paris, leading the good life, the 1.4 million French dead breathed icily down the backs of their necks. Regular visits conveyed them to the ruins of Saint-Gervais, to be reminded of the outrage of that Good Friday of less than a year before. Paris and the Parisians would simply not allow their foreign guests to forget what France had suffered and lost. She had to have security, lasting security: frontiers in the ethnically German Rhineland, such as Louis le Grand had sought two and a half centuries previously, and Napoleon after him. The chant of “Que l’Allemagne paye …” was constantly in the background.

  By April 1919 none of the delegates meeting at the Quai d’Orsay was a happy man. For all France’s desperate pursuit of security at any price, Clemenceau—the man of ’71—had failed to gain for her a permanent frontier on the Rhine (instead he got a fifteen-year tenancy, which Adolf Hitler would promptly terminate) or annexation of the coal-rich Saar (though, throughout its entire history, the German-speaking Saar had been French for only twenty-three years). The Parisian press, as rabid as it had been in the run-up to war, launched savage and unrelenting personal attacks on Wilson and Lloyd George. As the wrangling dragged on and the Allies went on demobilizing, it began to look as if soon the war would have to be fought again. Clemenceau stepped up the pressure to produce a treaty, any treaty. Whatever happened, it had to be signed and sealed by the Germans before the triumphal parade planned for the quatorze juillet.