Eiffel also was intrigued by the effects of wind—a study that had large payoffs in the new field of aviation, especially when he extended his research by building a wind tunnel. He demonstrated that aircraft lift came about largely by airflow over rather than under the wing surface, and he also made a major discovery in propeller design. After the neighbors along the Champ de Mars complained about the noise, Eiffel moved his wind tunnel west, to Auteuil. There, he built a laboratory that contributed significantly to the effectiveness of French military aircraft during the war.
Despite their fragility, these early planes had to undergo rough conditions. As Gabriel Voisin later wrote, it was “necessary to land and to take off heavily loaded on broken ground, and our landing gear was the only one able to undertake easily this sort of intensive duty.”54 The Voisin III pusher plane became the fighter and reconnaissance plane of choice for the French during the war’s early years, and its steel frame construction gave it the strength to serve as a light bomber—at least until more powerful engines were added in 1916.
Critically, the Germans had held air superiority at the outset of the Battle of Verdun, but the Allies quickly learned to change tactics to meet the so-called Fokker Scourge by providing escort for reconnaissance aircraft and by forming fighter squadrons. Prior to Verdun, the Germans had used their air superiority to conduct highly detailed photographic reconnaissance of French positions and to deny the French the opportunity to do the same over German lines. Initially, this policy served the Germans well, but the Germans then made the mistake of continuing their aerial blockade—wasting resources that could have been used to break up the French supply line along the all-important and vulnerable Voie Sacrée. The French, for their part, ramped up their fighter and reconnaissance units in Verdun (including the Lafayette Escadrille, largely made up of American volunteer fighter pilots), and by late summer had regained control of the skies above Verdun.
The Battle of Verdun ended in victory for the French, who had prevented the Germans from capturing the city and who had inflicted enormous losses on the enemy. “Ils ne passeront pas” (“They shall not pass”) had proved a stirring inspiration for French defenses throughout the terrible ordeal.55 Yet French casualties over the course of the year-long battle had also been enormous, and there still was no sign of an end to this murderous war.
At the year’s close, Paris remained a city essentially under siege, occasionally bombarded by German Zeppelins and suffering increasing deprivation. Food shortages were common, food prices were rising dramatically, and rationing (beginning with sugar) was about to begin. Temperatures fell close to zero degrees Fahrenheit that winter, and coal was at a premium. Late in the year, Jean Cocteau would write Stravinsky, “Here we are freezing for lack of coal.”56
On Christmas Eve, Debussy wrote a note to his wife, telling her, “Never has your love been more precious or more necessary to me.” And then he despairingly concluded: “Noël! Noël! The bells are cracked. Noël! Noël! They have wept too long.”57
Chapter Nineteen
Dark Days
(1917)
“This life in which you have to fight for a lump of sugar or for manuscript paper, not to mention your daily bread, needs stronger nerves than mine,” Debussy wrote despairingly in the spring of 1917.1
Paris was dark and cold in the winter and early spring of 1917, and Parisians took it quietly when news came that the Germans had begun to evacuate their positions on the Somme. “We knew by then,” wrote Helen Pearl Adam, “that more than such a retirement was necessary to bring victory into sight.” In addition, “what attention we had to spare for ourselves was entirely devoted to keeping warm.”2 Fuel was scarce, and the unremitting cold had frozen water pipes throughout the city, adding water to the list of scarcities. “I’ve adopted as my motto a variant of Wilson’s ‘Too proud to fight’ which runs ‘Too cold to sleep,’” Edith Wharton wrote Bernard Berenson, adding that her warm feelings for him were “the only thing left of me that’s not below zero, after so many days of this inexorable cold.”3
Woman worker on machinery in the French Métro, Paris, France, March 28, 1917. Photo Credit: The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.
In the midst of the cold and gloom, life went on, sometimes with an undertone of grim mockery. On January 29, after more than fifty years of cohabitation, Auguste Rodin finally married Rose Beuret—apparently at the instigation of those among his closest friends and supporters who wished to quiet any remaining disgruntlement over the unsanctified relationship. One does not know what Rodin made of this event; he was too old by this time to register much, or at least to put up much of a protest. As for Rose, she too was well past her mental prime. It had always been difficult to know exactly what Rose thought, and in any case, the marriage that she may have longed for did not last long. Soon after the hasty wedding at their stark and unheated home in Meudon, Rose became ill and died.
Early that same January, Maurice Ravel’s beloved mother passed away. Although she had been ill for some time, her death devastated him. “My captain keeps telling me that ‘I’ve got to snap out of it,’” Ravel wrote his wartime godmother, Madame Dreyfus. Yet despite efforts to get over his grief, Ravel remained severely depressed. His mother’s death, added to all that he had seen and experienced during the war, deeply affected him. “Physically, I’m still all right,” he assured Madame Dreyfus. But “spiritually, it’s dreadful.”4 In fact, Ravel was not in good health either physically or emotionally, leading to a temporary discharge from military service that became permanent. In June, while recuperating at the home of Madame Dreyfus, he completed his lovely Le Tombeau de Couperin, each of whose six movements is dedicated to a fallen friend or friends.5 He would compose nothing new for three years, and comparatively little after that for the remainder of his life.
By the spring of 1917, France had succeeded in staggering through almost three years of devastating warfare, in alliance with Great Britain, Russia, and, more recently, Italy (Italy declared war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1915 and against Germany in 1916). It was Russia in the east and the United States in the west that now provided equal measures of hope and despair in this war without end.
Strikes and armed clashes broke out in war-torn and demoralized St. Petersburg in February, followed by a mutiny of the troops and the abdication of the czar. In New York, Isadora Duncan draped herself on stage in the French flag as she played to packed houses, rejoicing in Russia’s emergence from autocracy and urging the United States to join the Allies in stopping the German tide. “At that time,” she later wrote, “I believed . . . that the whole world’s hope of liberty, regeneration, and civilization depended on the Allies winning the war.”6
Although Russia’s new provisional government pledged to continue the fight, the Bolsheviks demanded an end to participation in the war, and anarchy rapidly spread throughout Russia’s badly demoralized troops. Lenin’s arrival in Russia, followed by rapidly escalating upheaval and the Bolshevik Revolution, would by March 1918 result in a peace treaty with the Central Powers—(“The very Russia that dragged us into this war!” an outraged Abbé Mugnier exclaimed at the news.)7 This removed Russia’s already-disintegrating opposition on Germany’s eastern front, making American entry into the war even more imperative. German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and British interception of German plans to ally with Mexico and Japan against the United States (the famous Zimmermann note), prompted the United States to sever relations with Germany and then, in early April 1917, to declare war.
The French were relieved and grateful, even though America was not yet on a war footing—Wilson had sought to signal his nation’s neutrality by abstaining from war preparations. Still, according to Adam, “France went quite mad about Americans,” and Paris was at the center of this national feeling.8 The Stars and Stripes joined the Tricolor at the top of the Eiffel Tower, accompanied by a 101-gun salu
te. General Pershing soon arrived in Paris, where at Lafayette’s tomb, he (or possibly his aide) uttered the moving words, “Lafayette, we are here.” That July 4, Parisians enjoyed a good look at an infantry regiment of American soldiers marching through their streets, prompting enthusiastic comments about the Americans’ “magnificent appearance.” The “tall, square” American soldier “became an immediate success in France,” Adam wrote. “He had come at a moment of stress, and we were grateful to him.”9
The stress she spoke of was an understatement. France’s badly demoralized soldiers had been going to the slaughter for too long, with only heavy losses and defeat to show for the bloodbath. France’s government was perceptibly floundering, and in May 1917, French troops along the front began to mutiny.
Late the previous year, the French government had finally managed to remove General Joffre as commander-in-chief, where he had taken almost total control over the conduct of the war—to the dismay of an increasing number of critics, who were appalled by his blind certainty of imminent victory and his willingness to sacrifice ever larger numbers of soldiers to achieve it. To appease him, Joffre was elevated to Marshal of France, where he occupied a largely ceremonial position and became a technical adviser to the government, while General Nivelle took his place.
Unfortunately Nivelle, who had an ambitious offensive plan of his own, was not much of an improvement. His plan relied on coordinated attacks by the Allies, but the prolonged cold and that year’s first Russian revolution, of February and March, set these back. The Italians’ decision to wait it out for a more propitious moment left the French and British very much on their own to face the Germans’ surprise unfurling of the Siegfried (or Hindenburg) Line—a falling-back, it was true, but to a ferociously defended line between Cambrai and the Chemin des Dames, the latter being a long and narrow ridge between two river valleys to the north of Paris. Deciding that this made little difference to the success of his plan, General Nivelle went ahead—despite grave doubts from the minister of war and from General Pétain, the only military commander to question the advisability of Nivelle’s offensive.
Squadron Chief Alfred Dreyfus was one of the hundreds of thousands of men who took part in this doomed offensive. That February, after repeated requests, fifty-seven-year-old Dreyfus received a transfer from essentially home-guard duty in the Paris area to the front, where he took command of an artillery group on the Chemin des Dames sector. The war had eaten through enough young lives that the older soldiers now were being called into frontline action.
The weather was “glacial,” Dreyfus recorded in his notebook, with driving rain and wind, and he found himself serving under Colonel Georges Larpent, a royalist, anti-Semite, and nationalist of the Ligue d’Action Française, who had published vociferously and extensively (under a pseudonym), including a Précis de l’Affaire Dreyfus that had become a major reference source for the anti-Dreyfusards. In spite of these difficulties, Dreyfus made no complaints and, for the most part, kept his spirits up. “Here, despite the mud, the rain, the snow, the absolute lack of comfort, I carry on wonderfully, and the morale of my men is good,” he wrote a friend, adding that his letters were necessarily banal because of censorship.10
Amid continued icy rains and biting wind, Dreyfus and his men underwent increasing cannon bombardment as the battle approached. “All night,” he wrote briefly in his notebook for April 15, “the formidable rumbling of cannons of all caliber.” During that night, he received orders for the offensive that was about to begin. He and his men were to cross the River Aisne at the Pont de Bourg-et-Comin and take part in the assault of the crest of the Chemin des Dames. His division, part of the 20th Corps of the Sixth Army, left promptly at six in the morning, but was caught in an immense crowd of other infantry divisions on the banks of the Aisne. Fortunately, Dreyfus noted, the Germans on the heights were sufficiently preoccupied with the French attack that they did not take aim at them, “otherwise it would have been a disaster for the munitions sections.” Two days later, caught in driving rain, he and his men still had not crossed the Aisne. “We’re in the mud up to our necks,” Dreyfus scribbled in his notebook.11
Nivelle was so sure of success that he had invited a group of legislators to watch this battle. It quickly turned into a disaster for the French, with enormous casualties. Still, Nivelle persisted in believing that the Germans had suffered disproportionately, and he continued to launch other attacks along the Siegfried Line, with similar results. Early on, Dreyfus was reporting heavy losses to the 20th Corps, and by May 12 they were pulling back, under heavy cannon and airplane bombardment. Nivelle’s offensives had failed.
With that, Parliament abruptly replaced Nivelle with General Pétain. Yet by this time, mutiny had broken out in the French army, starting at the killing fields where these most recent offensives had taken place. The mutinies began in early May, as troops refused to go into battle, and the movement quickly spread. Before it was over, some thirty or forty thousand soldiers had participated, including two regiments that decided to march on Paris to force Parliament to end the war. The generals blamed this outbreak on revolutionaries, pointing to incidents where red flags were waved and the Internationale was sung. What the generals failed to see was that these uprisings were simply a vast protest movement against their own incompetence and the ruinous way the war was being waged. Since Pétain was in fundamental agreement with his troops, it was relatively easy for him to bring the mutinies to a close by ending Nivelle’s disastrous offensive. He punished the most flagrant of the offenders (forty-nine of the mutineers were executed), but he took care to show his interest in his troops’ welfare, including restoring their leave (which had been suspended). By mid-June, the mutinies were over.
That July, Charles de Gaulle and three of his comrades from Fort IX were transferred to a prison fortress at Rosenberg, built at the edge of a sheer wall of rock. By way of reinforcement, the prisoners’ quarters were surrounded by two walls and two moats. The walls did not look like much of a problem to de Gaulle and his cohorts, but the perpendicular descent down the rock face gave them pause, especially since they had no idea of how high up they were or how long their rope would have to be. Taking the average calculated by those they talked with about it, they made their rope ninety feet long, using strips of sheets. They also constructed an eighteen-foot ladder that could be dismantled.
One rainy night in October, when the sentries were sitting cozily in their boxes and unlikely to venture out, the men decided to make their break. By ten o’clock they had reached the top of the cliff and lowered one of the team over the edge, where they discovered that the rope was not long enough. Hauling him up, they began again, finding another spot where they could do the deed in two stages. By midnight, they were on their way for the Swiss border—this time, nearly three hundred miles away.
After ten days of marching, they were worn out and decided to find shelter in a dovecote. Unfortunately, peasants working in the fields heard them and warned a soldier, who called for aid and hauled them in. Knowing that this latest escapade would send them promptly back to Fort IX, de Gaulle and one colleague decided to move quickly. Sawing through a bar in their window, they climbed out while a friend replaced the bar and retrieved their rope. Dressed in civilian clothes they had somehow wangled, they walked off, this time aiming for the Dutch border via the train. Again, they were spotted and were arrested in the station. Promptly sent back to Fort IX, de Gaulle was punished by “shuttered windows, no light, special diet, nothing to read, no writing materials, half an hour’s exercise a day in a court measuring a hundred square yards.” He was bitterly depressed. “When one is formed for action,” he wrote his parents that December, “being so totally and irremediably useless . . . is the cruelest [position] for a man and a soldier that can be imagined!”12
Stravinsky, who was trying to make ends meet in Switzerland, and Diaghilev, who was trying to keep his Ballets Russes afloat while his star, Nijinsky
, was sinking into psychosis, did not yet realize that the Russia they had always known was rapidly vanishing. Stravinsky’s first impulse, upon hearing of the February revolution, was to go home—to “our dear, liberated Russia.”13 Diaghilev was similarly sympathetic to the new Kerensky regime, but he turned down an opportunity to become its minister of culture. By the year’s end, the Bolshevik Revolution had changed his Russia forever, while it deprived Stravinsky of “the last resources which had still from time to time been reaching me from my country, and I found myself . . . face to face with nothing, in a foreign land and right in the middle of the war.”14
Chagall, on the other hand, was caught inside Russia during that year of upheaval. “On Znamensky Square in front of the great monument of Alexander III,” he wrote, “people began to whisper: ‘Lenin has arrived.’ . . . ‘Lenin from Geneva?’ ‘The very same.’” And in Vitebsk, a group of actors and painters gathered to found a ministry of arts. Chagall’s wife wept when she heard that he had been selected as its head. “She warned me it would all end badly,” Chagall later wrote. Instead of “peacefully painting” his pictures, he founded a school of fine arts and became “its director, its president and everything else.”15 At first he thought it a lucky break, but from the outset, his wife thought otherwise.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 41