Children of the Siege

by Diney Costeloe

  Later that evening, when the news of the disturbances began to find its way to the more prosperous neighbourhoods, he was told of the mob violence by Pierre. Emile made no mention of having been caught up in it. He simply shook his head in apparent disbelief, remarking, ‘We’ve more to fear from our own countrymen than the Germans now. The Prussians will sit snug in their encampments and watch us tear ourselves to pieces.’

  Once again Rosalie suggested removing the family to the comparative safety of St Etienne, but Emile dismissed the idea. If he had admitted how close he’d been to that violent mob, she would have insisted, but as he made no further reference to the events in Montmartre, Rosalie simply accepted it as another exaggerated rumour and said no more.

  The following morning Emile walked out into the town, simply to take the air, he said, in answer to Rosalie’s raised eyebrows, but he wanted to see what reaction there was to the Montmartre riots. He walked towards the centre of the city and strolled along the left bank of the Seine. Surprisingly, it seemed to be a normal Sunday. There were National Guardsmen about, but there was nothing threatening about them, and people were taking their usual Sunday promenade in the warm spring sunshine. Emile met several acquaintances, neighbours from nearby, a couple of business associates, and none of them seemed in the least anxious or expressed any surprise at seeing him out and about.

  The news that the government had lost its nerve after the confrontation in Montmartre and had left Paris for Versailles had not yet reached his peaceful neighbourhood. He had not been to the Hôtel de Ville, the City Hall, and seen the red flag flying from its belfry. During the night the last of the government ministers had decided that Paris had become too hot for them and had quietly left the Hôtel de Ville through an underground passage, and the building had been seized by some of the dissident National Guard, but Emile had no knowledge of this and returned home relaxed.

  ‘There’s no need to make a dash for the country yet,’ he assured Rosalie at luncheon. ‘Indeed, if you and the children would care to take a walk in the park this afternoon, I’d be happy to accompany you.’

  Rosalie smiled and agreed it would be very pleasant to get out of the house on such a beautiful day. Walking along by the river they saw a small band of National Guardsmen, causing Hélène to shrink against her mother as she remembered the furious face of the guardsman who had tried to catch hold of her at the Prussian parade.

  Seeing her reaction Emile said bracingly, ‘Chin up, Hélène, nothing to fear from those gentlemen, they’re not Prussians.’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ she whispered, but she held tight to her mother’s arm nonetheless.

  Unbeknownst to Emile, Rosalie had also felt a frisson of fear at the sight of the swaggering guardsmen. She remembered only too well their behaviour at the city gate. This bunch looked harmless enough, but you never knew, did you? Even now Rosalie wished with all her heart that they had never returned from St Etienne; at least she and the girls should have stayed in the country where there were no National Guards, no shouting mobs and where the Prussians lived quietly in their encampments. She said nothing more to her husband, there was no point in upsetting Emile unless she had to, but she decided to begin making plans for their removal. It would be a long and arduous journey by train. They still had no carriage and no horses. Pierre had returned to their carriage the day after their arrival in the Avenue Ste Anne and found it stripped of every removable part. When Emile had heard, he merely said that they did not need a carriage for the time being, the light chaise was still in the coach house if required and he could always take a cab to the office. But from the rumour of violence and riots yesterday, it was clear to her that the city wasn’t safe for anyone and Rosalie made up her mind to take the girls back to the country as soon as possible, despite Emile’s opposition if necessary. Quite aside from the dangers of Paris, seething with unrest, it would do them all good to get back to the clear fresh air of the country where the children could quite safely ramble in the surrounding meadows. Apart from their surprise excursion this afternoon, they had been cooped up in the house for too long. Hélène was beginning to look decidedly pasty, and had complained of occasional headaches, and all three were bad-tempered and peevish.

  Marie-Jeanne and she would take them on the train, Rosalie decided, accompanied by Pierre if Emile was really unable to leave, and they would stay in the country until life in Paris became settled. Mademoiselle Corbine should come too, of course, so that the girls’ schooling should not be interrupted. Relieved at having made a decision, Rosalie waited for the right moment to tell her husband.

  Her plans came to an abrupt halt next morning, however, when at last the long-awaited letter arrived from Georges, her eldest son. Her joy at hearing he was alive and well overcame her natural reticence and she ran up the stairs clutching the letter and rushed unannounced into Emile’s study.

  ‘Georges is here in Paris!’ she cried, waving the single sheet of paper at her husband. ‘This was brought by one of his men. I’ve sent him down to the kitchen for a meal. Oh, Emile, isn’t it wonderful? Georges in Paris and he’s coming to see us! Not for a few days, but in the next week. Perhaps he’ll have news of Marcel.’

  Emile’s pleasure in receiving news of his son was probably as great as Rosalie’s, but his expression of it was far more restrained. Reaching for the letter he carried it to the window to read for himself.

  ‘This is indeed good news, my dear,’ he said, turning back to her with a smile. ‘We must thank God he’s safe.’

  ‘Will he be able to come here to live?’ asked Rosalie, as excited as a child. ‘Will he be back with us for good, do you think?’

  ‘I doubt if he will live at home,’ returned her husband. ‘He says here that his troop are bivouacked in the Luxembourg Gardens waiting for billets. Have his man brought up here when he has eaten and we’ll ask him what’s happening.’

  The corporal knew no more than where the battalion was camped and that Lieutenant St Clair had been called to Versailles and would be back in Paris in a day or two.

  The following days were full of excited anticipation in the house in Avenue Ste Anne; everyone listened for the doorbell, and should it sound, the household held its breath until the caller had been admitted and was discovered not to be Georges. There were, in fact, few visitors these days. Gone were the social comings and goings of visits and morning calls, drives through the Bois and evening parties. Much of Paris society and many of the well-to-do had not yet ventured back to the city, and those who had remained, or returned early like the St Clairs, kept very much within doors as the outbreaks of unrest and violence grew more persistent.

  Mademoiselle Corbine kept her charges busy, but she was equally unwilling to leave the house and so the tasks she set were confined to the house and its secluded walled garden.

  Hélène found this forced seclusion particularly irksome. She had loved the freedom of St Etienne and grown used to it during their extended stay. Cooped up in the house in the Avenue Ste Anne she was becoming bored and bad-tempered. Clarice dubbed her ‘Cross-patch’, and the two girls seldom passed a day without an argument which usually ended in tears and Hélène complaining she had a headache.

  Of Jeannot there was no sign. He seemed to have disappeared back into his own world. Hélène wondered what he was doing and how he was passing his days, and envied him the freedom of being able to decide. Only the news that Georges had survived the war and was coming to see them made her world seem brighter.

  5

  Marcel St Clair limped into Paris through the Porte de la Villette, and made his way slowly through the back streets towards Montmartre. He had walked all the way from the internment camp outside Sedan, the so-called camp of misery, where he and the remains of his corps had been held as prisoners after the battle of Sedan was lost.

  Hundreds of prisoners had been herded into the bulge of land contained by the River Meuse. A canal made the fourth side of the area and two cannon faced into the camp across the onl
y bridge, discouraging any breaks for freedom. The French soldiers were left for days with little shelter or food in the conditions that gave the camp its miserable name, before they were gradually led out company by company and marched to prison camps in Germany.

  Marcel, young and still strong, was a survivor, and became almost feral as he used whatever means that came to hand to ensure that he remained one. As men around him in the camp fell ill, weakened by dysentery, starvation, cold and unattended wounds, Marcel had no compunction in relieving them of any morsel of food they had managed to find. Occasionally baskets of bread were sent in by the local townspeople, but if they managed to get them past the guards at the gate, it was only the strongest of the prisoners who got hold of any. It was every man for himself and Marcel soon determined that he was not going to miss out. He held himself aloof from his mates, many of whom lay dying on the ground as they sought shelter amongst the trees and bushes, but as evening fell each day and they lay exhausted, he would slip down among them in the darkness and take anything which might be of use to him: a coat, a hat, a scarf, a better pair of boots, even the last few francs from a dying man’s pocket.

  He’s got no use for these things any more, Marcel reasoned, and I have.

  Dysentery was rife, but Marcel stayed alone, determined not to succumb, so that when his platoon were called he still had strength to march out of the hellhole where he’d been confined for nearly two weeks, with a pair of boots that nearly fitted him, a piece of old blanket that he wrapped round him over the tatters of his uniform and a small-bladed knife he’d retrieved from the body of a dead comrade the previous night. His entire focus had been on survival and he had made it. His next goal was escape.

  As they marched towards the German border, many of his companions fell by the wayside, literally collapsing into the hedges and ditches that lined the road, but that was not a means of escape, as these were often dispatched with a bullet in the head or the plunge of a bayonet into the back. Marcel watched and waited, trying to work out when and how to make a break for it. He had no weapon but his knife, little money and his clothes were in rags, but his resolve was unshakable. He would escape from the Prussians, return to Paris and destroy the officers who had led them so disastrously into humiliation and defeat. The Emperor had fled with his enormous baggage train, and left his countrymen to face imprisonment or death. Marcel had no intention of submitting to either and was bent on revenge.

  Each evening on the march, the dwindling group of prisoners was herded into a barn or a cowshed. Bread was issued, the doors were closed and guards posted. There appeared to be no way out of these buildings, but Marcel searched for possibilities even so. On one evening as the twilight was darkening to night, he heard a hoarse whisper in his ear.

  ‘Hey, you! St Clair!’

  Marcel turned his head but could see little but the shadow of a man in the darkness.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he hissed, bunching his fists ready to defend himself.

  ‘Durand,’ came the whispered reply.

  Marcel recognised the name, could even put a face to it. Gaston Durand was in B company, a small but muscular man, with a strong growth of beard and a shock of black hair. An unpopular man with a vicious temper who always decided an argument with his fists or, if he had one, a knife. He carried an arcing scar above one eye, the souvenir of one such fight, and men tended to steer clear of him. He too had decided that he wasn’t going to be locked up as a prisoner in Germany, and he’d recognised the same resolve in Marcel.

  ‘What do you want?’ Marcel demanded, his own voice gruff with menace.

  ‘Same as you,’ returned the other. ‘Time to get out, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh sure!’ agreed Marcel with sarcasm. ‘Shall we leave now?’

  ‘Could do,’ Durand replied, ‘if you’ve the stomach for it.’

  ‘For what?’ Marcel failed to keep the note of intrigue from his voice.

  ‘You got a weapon?’

  ‘No,’ Marcel replied, even as he fingered the little knife in his pocket.

  ‘Me neither,’ Durand said, ‘but this barn’s falling to pieces. I did a recce when they first shoved us in here. There’s old, rusty farm stuff at the back. Easy to make a weapon.’

  ‘Yeah? And who’re you going to use it on?’

  Marcel couldn’t see the other man’s face but he could hear the excitement in his voice as he answered, ‘There’s a door at the back that looks pretty old and rotten. I reckon we could bust out there with no trouble.’

  ‘Yeah? And onto the bayonet of a Prussian sentry?’

  ‘There won’t be one.’

  ‘What do you mean there won’t be one?’

  ‘We’ll create a diversion.’

  ‘Diversion? What sort of diversion?’

  ‘There’s a load of straw in here,’ Durand said.

  Marcel said nothing. He’d already seen the straw and earmarked a patch in the corner for his own bed. It was days since he hadn’t had to sleep on the cold ground.

  ‘Well,’ Durand went on, eager to keep Marcel’s attention, ‘we make ourselves a couple of weapons from that old farm stuff and then we wait by that back door. A match to that straw will cause a blaze and the fuckers’ll have to open the doors to let us all out. There’ll be a stampede, and in the chaos we can make a break for it. We’ll be armed and any bloody Kraut in the way’s a dead man.’

  ‘Supposing they don’t,’ said Marcel.

  ‘Supposing they don’t what?’ demanded Durand.

  ‘Supposing they don’t open the doors? Supposing they decide to let the fire burn and all of us with it?’

  Marcel felt the man shrug. ‘They won’t,’ he said dismissively. ‘Not even these German bastards will do that.’

  ‘They’ll do anything,’ Marcel said. ‘You saw them after Sedan, shooting the wounded.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I like the idea of making ourselves some sort of weapon.’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Durand, and taking hold of Marcel’s arm he pulled him through the barn. Marcel’s eyes had gradually adjusted to the darkness, and he realised that there were holes in the aged roof where glimmers of moonlight offered a faint grey light. He could make out shapes now and decipher what they were. Bodies littered the floor, exhausted men lying where they had fallen as sleep overcame them, and Marcel and Durand met with anger as they pushed their way through those already bedded down on the straw for the night.

  ‘Look out where you put your fucking feet.’

  ‘Christ! Get off me!’

  ‘Mind my bleedin’ legs!’

  Ignoring such cries, they reached the back of the barn where Marcel could just make out the outline of the door frame.

  ‘See,’ whispered Durand, ‘easy enough to break out there.’ Then he bent over and picked up a curved piece of rusty iron from amid the straw. ‘And this’d give a Kraut something to think about,’ he added, hefting it in his hands. ‘Wouldn’t wake up from a bash with this. Feel around,’ he said to Marcel, ‘see what you can find.’

  Marcel was already searching through the straw and moments later he too had found something, a piece of piping, maybe the handle of an old plough. He didn’t know what it was, but that didn’t matter, it felt good in his hand. With that and his knife he might stand a chance in a fight.

  ‘Right,’ Durand said. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready for what?’ demanded Marcel.

  ‘Our diversion,’ said Durand. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Christ, Durand, you can’t!’ cried Marcel, his horror of what he thought Durand was going to do making him forget to keep his voice down. ‘You’re mad! You’ll kill us all.’

  ‘Not if we’re quick I won’t. When we break out of here the others will follow.’

  ‘But they’re all asleep!’

  ‘It’ll soon wake them up,’ snapped Durand. ‘Are you with me?’

  Marcel had become ruthless on the battlefield, but even his ruthlessness did not go as far as killing anythi
ng up to a hundred of his comrades in cold blood, just so he himself could escape. ‘No!’ he cried, clutching his knife in his hand. ‘Not in this. This is plain murder!’

  ‘Thought you had more balls!’ snarled Durand, and with no further warning he swung his makeshift weapon at Marcel’s head. Although he couldn’t see the sweep of it through the darkness, instinct made Marcel throw up an arm to protect himself, and the curved metal smashed against it. With a cry of pain he staggered sideways, but managing to keep his feet, he launched himself at his attacker, thrusting viciously upward with his knife and feeling it bite into Durand’s shoulder. With a roar of rage, Durand dropped his weapon and Marcel thrust again, this time at his face, laying open his cheek. Ignoring the pain, Durand flung himself at Marcel once more, grabbing him round the neck and crashing them both to the floor. Marcel was winded and before he could regain his feet, Durand was on his. With one final kick at Marcel’s head, he struck a match and tossing it into the straw, turned his attention to the rotten door.

  For a moment Marcel must have blacked out, for the next thing he knew there were screams of ‘Fire!’ and the exhausted prisoners were scrambling to their feet, fighting their way through dense smoke to where they thought the door might be.

  The flames took hold extremely quickly and there was blind panic among the confined men. Durand had been right about the strength of the old door and it only took moments before its rotten wood and rusty hinges gave way before his onslaught. As the door burst open the rush of oxygen gave new vigour to the flames and the panic escalated as the terrified captives struggled and fought to escape the inferno. Many, those further in, were almost immediately consumed by the fire, hopelessly beating at their burning clothes, rolling on the floor in their efforts to put out the flames and only succeeding in setting light to even more straw.