by John Baxter
Something about his buttons all a shine shine shine
Oh a military chest seems to suit the ladies best
There’s something about a soldier that is fine fine fine.
NOEL GAY, “Something About a Soldier”
After its defeat by the Prussians in 1871, France constructed forts to bar the route from the east, which, they assumed, any future German invader must take. Colossal carbuncles of concrete, forty feet thick, bristling with cannon, they were served by thousands of men permanently quartered underground in miles of tunnels.
Supporting them at ground level was a fast-moving military machine geared to the style of fighting perfected by Napoleon Bonaparte. Its horse-drawn artillery, mostly light 75 mm field guns, could move swiftly to meet any attack. Every Frenchman underwent two years’ obligatory military service. This created a reservoir of trained troops, ready to be called up at the first whiff of hostilities. Each reservist received a carnet de mobilization, with details of where to report in the event of the war that many expected, even hoped would come.
For cavalry charges and infantry clashes in open country, France was well prepared. It knew nothing of long-range artillery, bombing, aerial reconnaissance, poison gas, the tank, and above all the machine gun. Even its colorful uniforms might have been designed to show contempt for modern warfare. Infantry wore a dark blue double-breasted tailcoat with brass buttons. The number of their regiment was embroidered on the collar. Baggy red trousers tucked into half-boots completed the outfit, which was topped with the kepi, a cylindrical cloth cap with a stiff brim: stylish but little protection against a bullet.
In forty-four years, nobody had ever worn this uniform under fire. Once they did, it proved embarrassingly visible, and the army hurriedly looked for a new design. The British, in the interests of consistency, urged them to adopt their khaki, but the French refused, for the very French reason that khaki resembled the brown fabrics favored by hunters. How embarrassing if an officer was mistaken for some farmer out with his shotgun to get a rabbit for the pot. They based their final choice, a pale “horizon blue,” on the army’s existing peacetime dress uniform, but French troops would always be more visible than the British in khaki, the Germans in gray, and the Americans whose dusty brown kit with cookie-like buttons earned them the label “doughboys.”
Fitted out for war
The poilu uniform—dangerously visible.
It took many weeks for everyone to receive a new outfit. “This was the period when the old uniform, in the process of changing to the new, had become unrecognizable,” wrote Cocteau. “Everyone wore it in his own way. And this cast-off kit, so comical in town, was magnificent in the armies—rank upon rank of ragamuffins.” Some officers remained fanatically loyal to the old uniform. One raged at a private in mismatched gear and ordered him to replace his blue trousers with red ones from a corpse. When the man refused, he was shot.
Pockets of such fanaticism lingered, reminders of the reverence in which France held its army at the end of the previous century. British soldiers startled the French when, following a rumored gibe by the kaiser that they were “a contemptible little army,” they began calling themselves “old contemptibles.” No officer of the Grande Armée would accept such an adjective. To do so would demean not only him but the force and, by extension, the nation. When an artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly condemned as a spy in 1894 and sent to Devil’s Island, the high command hid its error for years, arguing that to reveal the injustice would undermine public confidence in the army. Novelist Emile Zola challenged this hypocrisy in his notorious broadside J’Accuse, and had to flee to England for his life.
French officers toasting their tailor
Faithful to von Bismarck’s ethic of “blood and steel,” the German army dismissed the French as “chocolate soldiers,” commanded by officers more concerned with creature comforts than with killing. In late September, as the western front stabilized along the Marne, a cartoonist for the Berlin-based comic magazine Die Lustige Blätter—The Funny Pages—showed monocled French cavalry officers relaxing in a château. Servants serve champagne and help them off with their high leather boots. One officer sings to another’s piano accompaniment. Half-read novels litter the floor, and in the foreground is a lady’s fashionable hat and hatbox. The caption sneered “These Frenchmen have decided not to take any notice of our advance.” The French magazine that reprinted it meant to mock German arrogance, but anyone familiar with the high command in Paris knew the drawing wasn’t far from the truth.
6
Taxi!
We need audacity, and yet more audacity, and always audacity!
GEORGES DANTON
From September 1914 to November 1918, Paris lived with war at the bottom of the garden. The trenches were as close as Times Square is to Bridgeport, Connecticut, or Santa Monica to Catalina Island. Commanders complained of inquisitive tourists wandering into the war zone, hoping for a closer look. In August 1914, American novelist Edith Wharton visited the border with Alsace and peeked over the mountain crest at the German batteries guarding it—after which, she explained, “we retreated hurriedly and unpacked our luncheon-basket on the more sheltered side of the ridge.”
Flicking zeppelins
Parisians got used to the distant thud of artillery. Zeppelins flew over the city, but since the bombs dropped were small, one could shrug off the occasional crater. The cover on the issue for April 1916 of La Vie Parisienne, the Playboy of its day, shows an underdressed young woman flicking away zeppelins as if they’re party balloons. Inside, the editors give fashion tips on what to wear in the air raid shelter. They recommend an ermine-trimmed evening coat over your nightgown. For head protection, they suggest borrowing a cap from your chauffeur.
In the absence of any recent experience, the war, both in Paris and at the front, was being improvised day by day. Which helps explain the episode of the taxis of the Marne.
When the Prussians defeated the French in 1871, they seized Alsace-Lorraine, the mineral-rich region along their border with France. Ever since, the loss of the province had maddened the French like an amputated limb that perversely continued to itch. On the Place de la Concorde, patriots draped in black a statue representing the eastern cities of Lille and Strasbourg, and laid wreaths there on state occasions. In Alsace itself, women discarded the red ribbons of their traditional headdress, vowing to wear only black ribbons until the German “theft” was corrected.
In Alsace!
The moment France mobilized in August 1914, General Joffre put into force Plan XVII. Four of France’s five armies, a total of 800,000 men, charged to the east, intent on reclaiming its lost territory. France’s most popular picture magazine, L’Illustration, its equivalent of Life, led the issue of August 25 with a full-page drawing of a French officer, saber in hand, embracing a swooning Alsatian girl in her black headdress while his men surged past, trampling the spread-eagle standard of the Deutsches Reich. The caption was unequivocal. En Alsace! In Alsace!
Journalists were delirious. “I have pinned on my wall, opposite the end of my bed, the newspaper that carries in letters of triumph these remarkable words: ‘The French in Alsace.’ And I feed, without ever being satisfied, on this flamboyant headline. It has captured my heart. It pours on me like a refreshing wine. It drenches the totality of my soul.”
In fact, Joffre had barely sighted Alsace when the Germans invaded Belgium and poured through on his flank. By the time that issue of L’Illustration went on sale, he was in full retreat. Adolphe Messimy, minister of war, called his senior general, Joseph-Simon Gallieni, out of retirement and offered him the thankless job of Paris’s military governor. With it went command of the Sixth Division, all that remained to defend the city—not, emphasized Messimy, that Gallieni would actually need to fight, since defeat appeared inevitable. Joffre, ever cautious, planned to retreat across the Seine, if not farther, before he made a stand. Gallieni and his men should join him, leaving Paris to fend for
itself.
But Gallieni was old school. Thin and tough as a riding crop, he’d graduated from France’s West Point, the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr. After a career mostly spent overseas, quelling rebellions in Madagascar and Indochina, he’d been offered command of the army in 1911. Though only in his late fifties, he turned it down, knowing he was dying of prostate cancer. The job went to “Papa” Joffre, whom he detested. “How fat he is,” Gallieni sighed when he heard of the appointment. “He won’t last three years.” As it was, Joffre outlived him by fifteen years.
Gallieni took a day to think about Messimy’s offer, then obeyed the call of duty that had ruled him all his life. The government, relieved to have found someone to cover its rear and its embarrassment, scuttled off to Bordeaux, at the other end of the country. Paris’s street singers, the Saturday Night Live of the time, greeted this news with a parody of the national song, La Marseillaise. The original words, Aux armes, citoyens / Formez vos bataillons—To arms, citizens / Form your batallions—became Aux gares, citoyens / Montez dans les wagons—To the railroads, citizens / Board your wagons.
General Gallieni
But abandoning Paris did not even cross Gallieni’s mind. On September 2, as the Germans leaped the Marne and came within twenty miles of the capital, close enough for their scouts to see the Eiffel Tower, a poster appeared on walls all over the city.
Inhabitants of Paris.
The members of the government of the Republic have left Paris to give a new impetus to the defense of the nation. I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the invader. This mandate I will fulfil to the end.
Gallieni.
Almost immediately, the gamble paid off. By extraordinary luck, the French found the body of an officer from the staff of the German commander, Alexander von Kluck. A map in his pack showed that von Kluck intended to deviate from the invasion plan created by Count Alfred von Schlieffen. Instead of taking Paris, he would swing around the city, hoping to drive the French toward the Swiss border. But in doing so, he would open a thirty-mile gap on his flank. Gallieni badgered Joffre into joining the British in an attack into that breach—the thrust of a stiletto under the ribs.
From getting troops into Paris to defend it, Gallieni’s problem changed to getting them out to where they were needed. He had called up the Seventh Division from reserve, but the men were stuck on the choked railway system. Rather than bring them into the bottleneck of Paris, he ordered the trains stopped at villages on the outskirts. But how to transport thousands of men from there to the Marne?
One of the taxis of the Marne, preserved in the museum of the Hôtel des Invalides
In 1940, hundreds of pleasure craft and fishing boats would be mobilized to cross the English Channel and rescue British and French troops trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. Twenty-six years earlier, Gallieni had a similar idea. Why not move the troops in private cars and taxis?
“That’s brilliant, mon général,” stammered an aide.
Believing, as did Ernest Hemingway, that “praise to the face is sheer disgrace,” Gallieni harrumphed “Eh bien, voilà au moins qui n’est pas banal!” (Well, at least it’s original!)
A call went out for automobiles and people to drive them. Racing cars, buses, and 150 of Paris’s notoriously cranky cabbies assembled in front of the Hôtel des Invalides, the seventeenth-century veterans’ hospital that had become army headquarters. Gallieni immediately sent them off in convoys, empty, to collect soldiers from villages such as Tremblay-lès-Gonesses, buried today under the runways of Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The red-painted Renault AG taxi was high and narrow, built to squeeze through congested streets. Its driver sat outside. Usually the compartment behind him carried only three passengers, but in 1914 five soldiers squeezed in, with their weapons and kit. They had a rough ride as the cabs jounced over dirt roads in the dark: headlights might have alerted the Germans. But astonishingly, it all worked, thanks in part to generous rations of pinard, the rough red wine the troops would rather drink than water.
In the course of two days, six hundred taxis ferried four thousand soldiers to the front. Their presence was decisive. The counterattack stopped the Germans dead, then forced them into retreat. It might have become a rout and ended the war, but Joffre lacked the men, the equipment, and the initiative to exploit his advantage. At the river Marne, forty miles from Paris, he dug in. So did the Germans. With their momentum lost and the Russians looming on their eastern border, they were effectively defeated. But the war would drag on for another four years. From time to time, one side created a “salient” or bulge in the line that the other forced back in place. When, occasionally, an assault broke through, the attackers had no plans for consolidating their success and were driven back to their trenches.
In part because of its incongruous use of taxis, the first Battle of the Marne was never taken as seriously as the failed battles of the Somme and Ypres that followed. This was still the phony war, the one that could end by Christmas. Troops had not yet become numbed to absurdities, and could respond to them with a sense of fun.
One such incident took place on September 11 near the village of Bregy, as the French pursued the retreating Germans. A young artist, Georges Bruyere, reported it to his family in a letter.
We came up on a battalion of chasseurs taking a break. Some were standing in a circle around an object, and then, impossible as it was, we heard a piano. What was it playing? A silly little waltz, one of those waltzes you hear at neighborhood dances, dear to the sentimental hearts of shop girls. But on the tragic immensity of this plain where the shadows were beginning to gather, it took on a character one couldn’t express.
As the tune suddenly changed, we realized it was a mechanical piano. The melancholy waltz was replaced by the craziest kind of polka from the old days. Closing my eyes, I thought the plain was spinning around me. But that wasn’t it! The group of soldiers was in motion. With grins on their faces, they raised their arms, couples formed, and the dance began.
Just as war didn’t stop the French from staging an impromptu dance on the battlefield, it never succeeded in stifling the commercial instinct, least of all in taxi drivers. As the front stabilized, they presented their bills: forty miles to the Marne and back, and at night rates too. And then there was the gasoline. . . . The ministry bargained them down to 27 percent—including tip. War or no war, some things about Paris were eternal.
7
The Taste of Transitoriness
The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.
EDWARD GRAY, Britain’s foreign secretary, 1914
In 1914, it seemed impossible that anything, even war, could impair the perfection of Paris. When people of other nations desired the best in art and music, food and drink, sex and sensation, fashion and culture, they came here. History would call the period from 1890 to 1914 la belle époque—“the beautiful age.”
The languid compositions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, sighs made music, soothed the air and wooed the mind. Inspired by the swirls of vines and tendrils, and of women’s hair, the design style known as art nouveau, “new art,” emphasized that France was the Woman of Europe and Paris therefore the Woman of France. The city basked in a golden glow—literally, since the introduction in 1828 of street lighting on the Champs-Elysées, its most fashionable avenue, made Paris the best-lit capital in Europe. Gas lamps rather than culture earned the title la ville-lumière—the city of light.
Art nouveau by Alphonse Mucha
On this flood of sensation and creativity, fashionable Parisians bobbed in a bubble perfumed with private references and intimate relationships and inflated with talk. An Australian visitor in 1909 was enchanted by “the alert, vivacious faces of the people in the streets; from the shrug of the men’s shoulders, the cut of their clothes and the careless swing of their canes; from the way the women carry themselves, and, above all, from the light-hearted drift and chatter about the caf
és.”
Conversation was, indeed, queen. But speaking French alone didn’t win an entrée to this culture of insiders. One had to speak the French of the dinner table and salon, with its courtly compliments, private jokes, and classical citations, its gossip and scandal. As the novelist John Gregory Dunne wrote of Hollywood almost a century later, discourse in such cultures is “all context, shared references, and coded knowledge of the private idiosyncrasies of very public people.” American novelist Edith Wharton, who remained in France throughout the war, wrote:
Everything connected with dinner-giving has an almost sacramental importance in France. The quality of the cooking comes first; but, once this is assured, the hostess’ chief concern is that the quality of the talk shall match it. To attain this, the guests are as carefully chosen as boxers for a championship; their number is strictly limited, and care is taken not to invite two champions likely to talk each other down.
In a society preoccupied with the moment, people talked and thought obsessively about memory and time. Its finest writer, Marcel Proust, spent his life re-creating in lapidary detail the fashionable society of his youth.
Jean Cocteau, an opium addict, celebrated the drug’s capacity to make time stand still. The nineteenth century had introduced man to only one entirely new sensation—speed. Opium was its necessary antithesis. “Everything one does in life,” Cocteau wrote, “even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to escape from the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”
A man made of opium. Cocteau as addict, drawn by himself during detoxification. At the height of his addiction, he smoked sixty pipes a day.