He kept the all-important post of minister of war for himself, and indeed kept all important decisions in his own hands. Devoting himself to the prosecution of the war, Clemenceau now would firmly lead his country through the difficult months to come.
Chapter Twenty
Finale
(1918)
“Misfortune dogged us during the winter,” wrote Helen Pearl Adam of that terrible winter of 1917–1918. Italian resistance was crumbling against the Austro-German offensive, all help from Russia had disappeared, and Germany now was prepared to throw its entire military strength onto its western front. “They meant to attack as soon as they were ready, and with the utmost possible force,” Adam recorded in her diary.1
After a hiatus of almost two years, German bombs began to fall once more on Paris. On the night of January 30–31, thirty planes dropped 144 bombs containing 7,400 pounds of high explosives—the largest raid so far of the entire war. Subsequent nights were almost as bad. The idea was to soften up and demoralize the city prior to and during Germany’s great offensive on the Arras–Saint-Quentin front in March, where the Germans expected to break through, opening their way to Paris.
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and British Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig review an honor guard in Paris after the Second Battle of Cambrai, from “L’Illustration,” 1918. French photographer Private Collection / Ken Welsh / The Bridgeman Art Library. © The Bridgeman Art Library.
In March, in coordination with its attack on the British army in the Saint-Quentin sector, Germany stepped up its aerial assault, bombarding the city by day with a frightening new weapon, its so-called Paris Gun. Little for certain is known about the construction of this siege gun, which the Germans destroyed before it could fall into Allied hands. What is known is that it was capable of hurling two-hundred-pound shells great distances, arcing in a trajectory that reached an altitude of twenty-five miles above the earth before descending into Paris, seventy-five miles away. When the first of these shells hit, early on the morning of March 21, 1918, the explosion rocked a large portion of the city. It landed on the Quai de la Seine, in northeastern Paris, followed by others at close intervals (twenty-one on that first day, and about twenty per day for many days thereafter). Distraught Parisians at first assumed that these were bombs dropped from airplanes flying too high to be heard or seen, but soon sufficient evidence showed that this new assault was from shells, not bombs.
But how? And from where? Parisians were familiar with Big Bertha, the monster that chewed through fortresses along the Germans’ relentless advance through Belgium into France, and quickly decided that this was the culprit. Yet given Big Bertha’s size and limited range, this meant that German agents were firing it from just outside the city, or even within the city itself. When French air reconnaissance finally pinpointed the source, the truth turned out to be far more devastating. The Germans had constructed a weapon so powerful that it launched its shells into the stratosphere (the first man-made objects to do so prior to V-2 flights). No wonder that Parisians had little or no warning before these missiles streaked downward, wreaking havoc.
On March 29, one of these shells hit the Right Bank church of Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais during its Good Friday service, collapsing the roof, crumpling a stone vault and support pillar, and sending tons of stone down on the hundreds of kneeling worshippers. Eighty-eight people died, and sixty-eight more were wounded in this disaster.2 Many more would die and even more would be wounded before the Germans withdrew the gun in August, just ahead of Allied advances.
Despite fears that the Germans might at any moment decimate treasures such as Notre-Dame and the Eiffel Tower, the Paris Gun never was sufficiently accurate to aim so precisely. Given the extent of its range, its gunners were hard-pressed to target with any more precision than the city itself.
Yet accuracy mattered little; what the Germans sought was the destruction of morale. A great number of Parisians now left the city, but as for the rest, Germany was largely unsuccessful. After “two days of stupor,” reported Adam, the rest of the population “settled to ‘sticking it.’”3 For his part, Clemenceau, surrounded by his anxious deputies, announced: “I am going to tell you a secret. Last night I slept, I slept well.”4
“Perhaps the most startling thing about Clemenceau’s present position,” wrote Adam in 1918, “is the fact that he might have been a pillar of the French Government all his days. . . . We seem to have been looking to him for guidance and reassurance for many years.”5
Yet throughout the length of Clemenceau’s long career in politics and journalism, his reputation had been an edgy one. He had begun his career as a fire-eater, as a left-wing republican loosely grouped with other left-wingers under the rubric of “radical.” He had earned a reputation for bringing down governments, not for leading them, and in more recent years he had turned against his labor constituency with a memorable sweep of strong-armed strike-breaking. A champion duelist with both words and weapons, he had not been nicknamed “the Tiger” for nothing.
All this seemed forgotten throughout the terrible first seven months of 1918, when Clemenceau not only remained in power but buoyed the entire nation, visiting the poilus, or infantrymen, in the trenches, and fairly prickling with determination to resist—and win. Le Père la Victoire (Father Victory), they called him, an affectionate appellation that conveyed both respect and trust. Steadfastly rallying the French, he never showed the smallest measure of doubt during Germany’s final effort to break through the four-year-long stalemate and achieve victory before American troops and materiel arrived in meaningful numbers on the western front.
France faced multiple crises during these months, but never more severe than those of March and early June, when the German armies under General Erich Ludendorff pushed closer to Paris—and to victory—than at any time since the opening of the war. Germany no longer was fighting on two major fronts and could afford to throw its entire weight into the war in the west. Its assault on the Somme sector (Battle of Saint-Quentin) on March 21, timed to coincide with the first pummeling of Paris with the long-range Paris Gun, routed the British and allowed the Germans to advance almost forty miles—a devastating development for the Allies. The Allies (who now, at long last, agreed to a joint command, with General Foch as commander-in-chief) were able to regroup and hold the German forces until May 27. Then the Germans broke through at Chemin des Dames, and by May 30—in a repeat of the terrors of 1914—they reached the River Marne, less than forty miles from Paris.
“The worst days of 1914 seemed come again,” wrote Helen Pearl Adam. “After four years of heroism and endurance, after four years of civilian patience, after four years of tested faith in victory, the solid ground beneath our feet threatened to fail.” No one spoke of it, she added. “The people who remained in Paris kept their flag flying.” But Paris banks sent their securities and their safe deposit boxes southward, as did various ministries and embassies, while Parisians “held furtive consultations as to what arrangements we could make if we had to walk out of Paris at one gate while the Germans walked in at another.”6
Claude Debussy was too weak to be carried to the cellar during the Germans’ bombardment of Paris. “During his last days he listened to the dismal sound of explosions,” his good friend Louis Laloy later recalled.7 Debussy’s suffering at last ended on March 25, when he died quietly in his bed.
The most touching account of Debussy’s last moments came from his twelve-year-old daughter, Chouchou, in a letter she wrote to her half-brother, Raoul Bardac. “Papa was asleep,” she recounted, “breathing regularly but very shallowly. He went on sleeping like that until 10 o’clock in the evening and then, gently, like an angel, he went to sleep forever.” She wanted to burst into tears, “but I forced them back because of Mama.”8
The funeral took place on March 28, the day before Good Friday, and included only a few of Debussy’s oldest friends. Many had le
ft Paris or were at the front; others, like Pierre Louÿs, Erik Satie, and René Peter, had become estranged. Debussy’s brother Alfred had gotten leave from the trenches, and Louis Laloy was also present in his soldier’s uniform. Laloy later wrote: “The Minister of Education took his place at the head of the procession. Side by side, . . . the two conductors of our great philharmonic societies, Camille Chevillard [Orchestre Lamoureux] and Gabriel Pierné [Concerts Colonne], walked in silence. . . . The sky was overcast. There was a rumbling in the distance. Was it a storm, the explosion of a shell or the guns at the front?”9
At the cemetery, the war’s dismal presence precluded orations. All that Chouchou could think of was, “‘I mustn’t cry because of Mama.’ I summoned up all my courage. . . . Tears restrained are worth as much as tears shed, and now it is night for ever. Papa is dead.”10
They buried him at Père-Lachaise, but the following year he was reinterred at Passy cemetery. There, Chouchou would soon join him.11
The bombings of Paris devastated Lili Boulanger, who had collapsed following her success in the Prix de Rome. Ever the extrovert, Lili thoroughly enjoyed her new celebrity, accepting public performances and social engagements even while she continued to compose prolifically. Yet her health and strength were not up to this kind of activity, and by mid-1917, she once again became severely ill. An operation did not help, and by late 1917 she was rapidly declining.
Returning to Paris, she suffered so intensely from the bombings that her mother took her to the countryside to escape. Nadia and their friends braved the bombardments to travel to and from to see her, bringing ice to relieve her pain and delivering medical assistance.
Yet they could do little to help. On March 15, 1918, Lili Boulanger died, at the age of twenty-four. Her friends and family were devastated, but it was Lili’s sister, Nadia, who would promote Lili’s works throughout the course of her own long and remarkable career as a teacher, lecturer, conductor, and soloist (of both piano and organ). In this capacity, the older of the two pioneering Boulanger sisters would continue to help the younger, working to secure at least a small space for the musical legacy of a talented woman who died much too young.
One night in the midst of the German bombardments, Proust decided to pay a visit to the poet Francis Jammes, who lived on the other side of the Seine, near the Invalides. Proust was successful in finding a taxi to take him (not an easy undertaking in wartime Paris), but he walked all the way home, his way lit by “the searchlights and the shellbursts in the sky and the reflections in the river.” When he reached the Place de la Concorde, he encountered a man who quickly fell into step beside him. They walked along like that, chatting, until they reached the Place de la Madeleine, where Proust was within a short distance of his residence and thanked the man for seeing him home. “He was a bad lot,” Proust later told Céleste. “I guessed it right away, but I didn’t show it until we parted.” After thanking him, Proust asked the fellow why he hadn’t attacked him. The answer? “Oh, not someone like you, monsieur”—which pleased Proust enormously.12
Céleste was taken aback by this encounter, especially after she began to put away Proust’s coat and hat. “When I got to the hat,” she recalled, “I couldn’t help exclaiming. The brim was full of bits of shrapnel. ‘Monsieur, look at all this metal!’. . . ‘Weren’t you afraid?’”
“No, Céleste,” he replied. “Why should I be? It was such a beautiful sight.”13
At about this time, Proust wrote a friend, “As for guns and Gothas, I assure you that I never give them a thought; I’m afraid of far less dangerous things—mice, for instance—and, not being frightened by air-raids . . . it would be an affectation on my part to pretend to a fear of them.”14
It was during one of the last and worst of the bombardments that Blaise Cendrars encountered Erik Satie lying at the foot of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Alarmed, Cendrars leaned over what he thought was a dead body and discovered that it was Satie, very much alive. What was he doing there? asked Cendrars. Satie replied that he realized that he was not under shelter, “but you know, that thing goes up into the sky and I have the feeling of being under shelter.” In any case, he added, “I’m composing a piece of music for the obelisk. A good idea, don’t you think?”
Cendrars replied that he thought it was quite a good idea, so long as it wasn’t a military march. No danger of that, Satie told him; he was composing a piece for the pharaoh’s wife who was buried there. “No one ever gives her a thought.”
Actually, Cendrars told him, it was Cleopatra’s mummy that was down there. “Impossible,” Satie retorted, and then hummed the tune he had composed. He added, “It’s only because of those damned guns that I’m here now—for the first time.”15
That spring, Jean Cocteau published Le Coq et l’Arlequin (The Cock and the Harlequin), a pamphlet of witty aphorisms that made Cocteau into the spokesman for the musicians Satie had dubbed Les Nouveaux Jeunes, soon to become known as Les Six. In it, Cocteau pleaded for a purely French music, much as Satie had done all those years before. This new music, declared Cocteau, “shuns the colossal. That is what I call ‘escaping from Germany.’”16 Cocteau proclaimed Satie the leader of this musical breakthrough and, perhaps surprisingly, attacked Debussy and Stravinsky as well as Wagner and Germany—Debussy, for his “impressionist polyphonies” and preoccupation with the sublime; Stravinsky, for his corruption by the theater. “I consider the ‘Sacre du Printemps’ a masterpiece,” Cocteau conceded, “but I discern in the atmosphere created by its execution a religious complicity existing among the initiated, like the hypnotism of Bayreuth.”17
Cocteau and his musical compatriots were quite willing, of course, to allow the infiltration of American jazz into their purely French music. The whole point of their aesthetic was freshness and originality, and the breezes that were blowing from across the Atlantic brought exactly what Cocteau longed for. He enthused over Mitchell’s Jazz Kings, whom he heard in a cabaret in the Casino de Paris, leading a critic to write that Cocteau’s artistic sensibility “fluctuated between Cubism and vaudeville.”18
Misia Edwards Sert once famously remarked that Cocteau “needs to make himself liked by everybody at the same time.”19 Yet despite Cocteau’s maddening contradictions, it was clear that with Le Coq’s resounding rejection of the past, he had emerged as a leading figure of Paris’s artistic future.
In May 1918, while Cocteau and his colleagues were debating the future of French music, Charles de Gaulle and his determined companions were transferred to the great fortress of Wülzburg. There he continued to hold what one fellow prisoner described as “an unquestionable ascendency over those around him.” Although de Gaulle was unaffected, “he knew how to keep people at a distance.” Everyone else addressed one another with the familiar tu. But “no one ever said tu to de Gaulle.”20
De Gaulle now decided to re-attempt an escape operation that he had tried before—being escorted out by someone disguised in a German uniform. All that was necessary was to break into the tailor’s shop that provided the guards’ uniforms and pretend that de Gaulle was being transferred elsewhere. Successfully negotiating the break-in and departure, and changing afterward into civilian clothes, he and his ersatz escort walked for a day and night toward Nuremberg, where they planned to take a train to Frankfurt. All went well until they were stopped by a patrol asking to see their papers. Back they went to Wülzburg.
So now, de Gaulle decided on another approach. Unable to climb the ramparts, he decided to hide in the huge basket of dirty laundry, slipping inside during those few moments between when the quartermaster checked the basket’s contents and when it was sent off, padlocked, to the nearby town. Having comrades who by this time were accomplished at picking locks, de Gaulle chose his moment after the quartermaster went off to search for the sentries to accompany the padlocked basket. The clever accomplices even supplied de Gaulle with a cable that allowed him to hold on firmly when the
basket was lifted.
De Gaulle managed the escape perfectly, and after emerging from the basket (in civilian clothes), he mingled with the crowds, hid in the forest outside town, and then walked toward Nuremberg, which he reached in three days. Unfortunately a bad stomach flu now hit him. Instead of waiting for a less-watched night train, he had to take the first train out, where he encountered military police. Once again, he failed.
In July, General Ludendorff threw his troops into yet another massive attack, in what became known as the Second Battle of the Marne, and now the Americans massively entered the fray.
American soldiers had begun to arrive in France the previous year; some of them took part in that year’s July 4 celebration in Paris. After training in that summer’s rain and mud, they were first deployed with French and British troops in relatively quiet sectors to break them in to the rigors of combat.21 By late May and early June 1918, American soldiers (by now flooding into France at the astounding rate of almost ten thousand a day) were beginning to make their presence felt on the battlefield, although they still were fighting within the French and British armies.
“On the fourth of July,” recounted Helen Pearl Adam, “Paris went mad,” with stars and stripes everywhere. Adam noted that her cook “says wisely that if America wins the war for us, what remains for us to say?” But her housemaid, “almost in tears, cries: ‘But we’ve fought for four years!’” Americans, a bit embarrassed by the accolades, “say that they wish they had already earned it, as they mean to do.”22
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 43