Paris at the End of the World

by John Baxter

  Further skepticism, warns Miromar, will lead inexorably to the Second Coming.

  Europe was not so rational that such ideas would be dismissed with a smirk. Particularly in Catholic cultures like that of France, the church still had influence. Both British Tommies and French poilus, mostly uneducated, many of them farmers, were ready to entertain the possibility of divine intervention. God was, after all, On Their Side. That the Germans also insisted Gott mit uns didn’t trouble them.

  From the first battles of the war, tales circulated in France of interventions by Saint Geneviève, the holy guardian of Paris, and acolyte of its patron saint, Saint Denis. In September 1914, Father Sauvêtre, pastor of the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont on the site of Montagne–Ste-Geneviève, at the edge of Paris’s Latin Quarter, published a booklet, Saint Geneviève and the German Invasion, which explained that it wasn’t Joffre or Gallieni who saved Paris, but the saint herself.

  At almost the same moment, British troops spoke of mysterious manifestations. On August 26, as the Germans poured in through Belgium and overwhelmed the town of Mons, General Horace Smith-Dorrien ordered the forty thousand men of the British Expeditionary Force to defend it as best they could. The effort, finally unsuccessful, cost 7,812 killed, wounded, and missing. The survivors fell back on Le Cateau in a withdrawal that didn’t stop until the BEF combined with the French to counterattack Von Kluck’s forces at the Battle of the Marne.

  During the days and nights they retreated down endless country roads, exhausted, sleepless, and terrified, British soldiers reported visions. “I had the most amazing hallucinations marching at night,” said one young officer, “so I was fast asleep, I think. Everyone was reeling about the road and seeing things. I saw all sorts of things; enormous men walking toward me, and lights and chairs, and things in the road.”

  Angels on the battlefield

  On September 5, Brigadier General John Charteris, the chief intelligence officer, reported that accounts of one vision, the Angel of Mons, were spreading through the ranks. It told “of how the angel of the Lord on the traditional white horse, and clad all in white with flaming sword, faced the advancing Germans at Mons and forbade their further progress.” Some men claimed the angel was Joan of Arc, though for her to have intervened on the side of the English, who had burned her at the stake, would have shown truly saintly forbearance.

  Tales also circulated of ghostly archers sending clouds of arrows into the German ranks, as phantom bowmen were supposed to have helped win the day for Henry V at Agincourt in 1415. This urban legend at least was easily traced to its source. Welsh author Arthur Machen read of Mons in the Sunday papers. “It was a tale to make the heart sink, almost to deep despair. It told of the British army in full retreat, nay, in headlong, desperate retreat, on Paris. The correspondent rather pictured an army broken to fragments scattered abroad in confusion. It was hardly an army anymore; it was a mob of shattered men.” The image inspired him. On September 29, the London Evening News published his short story “The Bowman.” During a fierce rearguard action, a British soldier recalls seeing the figure of Saint George on the plates in a London restaurant and the motto Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius: May Saint George Help the English. As he visualizes the design, he sees a “long line of shapes that resemble archers [who] let fly a cloud of arrows at the advancing Germans, who fall dead in their thousands.”

  French troops, their imaginations lubricated with pinard and tafia, were just as ready to credit the deity for their victory on the Marne. They spoke of finding dead Germans without visible wounds. Had they been scared to death by some terrifying vision? Others speculated about secret weapons. Lights had been reported in the sky over Paris, and thumps and bangs underground. The lights were traced to restaurants in Montmartre that ignored the blackout and neglected to turn off their advertising signs, while the subterranean noises came from cellar bakehouses where bakers thumped and pounded bread dough, the adulturants added to flour at government order having made it tougher to knead.

  Unconvinced, poilus talked of Jules Verne-ian gadgets such as an invisible aircraft, the ancestor of today’s drones, that could hover above the clouds and send down bolts of electricity to fry the enemy. Before the war, chemist Eugène Turpin, a friend of Verne and inspiration for at least one of his eccentric scientist characters, patented an improved explosive based on picric acid. Who was to know he didn’t also develop a super shell that killed by displacement of air alone? He hadn’t, and the troops learned in time that proximity to a conventional blast could be just as fatal. In April 1917, poet Edward Thomas survived the Battle of Arras, but stood up to light his pipe just as one of the last shells landed nearby. A second later he fell dead, but without a scratch.

  The most resourceful wartime use of psychic phenomena took place not in Paris but in Turkey. Rather than waste troops as guards, the Turks trucked their prisoners hundreds of miles into the mountains, where an old farm in Yozgat Province became a prison camp. It required only a handful of guards. Any escapee would simply wander in the wilderness until he died of starvation and exposure.

  Welshman Elias Jones and Australian C. W. Hill conceived an audacious plan. In nightly séances using a Ouija board and the type of verbal codes employed by vaudeville mind readers, they convinced, first their fellow prisoners, then the officers of the garrison that they could communicate with the spirit world. They told the commandant that the ghost of the farm’s former owner, an Armenian killed by the Turks, had mentioned buried gold. Its location would be revealed only when the commandant had prayed for forgiveness at the grave of the murdered man. Jones and Hill intended to photograph the commandant as he did so, using a homemade camera. They would then blackmail him with the photos into setting them free. Wisely, they abandoned this crackpot scheme and simply mimed possession by evil spirits. It got them into hospital in Constantinople, from where they escaped or were released—ironically just a few weeks before the end of the war.

  Jones and Hill were right to exploit the prevailing sense of madness. The war inspired a new belief that gods might intervene in the affairs of men: the Second Coming threatened in The Land of Mist. Those poets who survived the war were transformed by it. They no longer doubted the potency of the unseen. It perched on their shoulder, gibbering, sinking its claws into their flesh.

  Robert Graves, in particular, turned away from the modern to embrace the muse of poetry, the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death. He related her to the deities of pagan mythology, and to the sybils, those psychics of the ancient world—prepubescent girls who, at Delphi, high above the Gulf of Corinth, perched on tripod seats over runnels of trickling water and, dazed by drug smoke and hormones, dispensed ambiguous advice to the emperors and satraps who abased themselves before them. Graves saw their era returning. “All a poet can do today is warn,” wrote Wilfred Owen. Taking up the challenge, Graves used the poem “On Portents” to toll the alarm bell of dreadful times to come.

  If strange things happen where she is,

  So that men say graves open

  And the dead walk, or that futurity

  Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,

  Such portents are not to be wondered at,

  Being tourbillions in Time made

  By the strong pulling of her bladed mind

  Through that ever-reluctant element.

  35

  The Beds in the West

  Where is the home of love so dear?

  Where but here—yea, here?

  Here love and danger snatch the flower

  Of life perchance a single hour,

  Mate and die.

  Here they lie—yea, here!

  RUTH GAINES, “Paris 1917”

  For almost a century, expatriate Paris had belonged, at least in culture, to the rich and educated. War alerted a much larger group to its pleasures. People moved there who would never have contemplated doing so before. Gertrude Stein wrote, “We saw a tremendous number of people but none of them as far as I can re
member that we had ever known before. Paris was crowded. As Clive Bell [art historian and brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf] remarked, they say that an awful lot of people were killed in the war but it seems to me that an extraordinarily large number of grown men and women have suddenly been born.”

  One newcomer was songwriter Cole Porter, the lone contribution to American culture of Peru, Indiana. Notwithstanding having written a flop Broadway musical called See America First, Porter arrived in Paris in July 1917, supposedly to work for a war relief charity but actually to study composition with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. He later claimed to have taught gunnery to American soldiers at the French Officers School at Fontainebleau, and to have joined the recruiting department of American Aviation Headquarters. Other versions have him serving with the Foreign Legion in North Africa. In Night and Day, a deliciously ridiculous 1946 biopic starring Cary Grant, he’s shown leaning against a palm tree, inspired by drums and some softly humming Zouaves to compose “Begin the Beguine” (actually written in 1935 during a Pacific cruise). In its obituary, the New York Times wrote, even less probably, that “he had a specially constructed portable piano made for him so that he could carry it on his back and entertain the troops in their bivouacs.”

  In a pungent and more accurate summary of Porter’s Paris years, J. X. Bell wrote, “He made up stories about working with the French Foreign Legion and the French army. This allowed him to live his days and nights as a socialite and still be considered a ‘war hero’ back home. Paris parties during these years were elaborate and fabulous, involving people of wealthy and political classes. His were marked by much gay and bisexual activity, Italian nobility, cross-dressing, international musicians, and a large surplus of recreational drugs.”

  Another new arrival was Henry Sturgis Crosby of Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts. The nephew of financier J. Pierpont Morgan, Crosby was tall, with startlingly good looks. He volunteered to drive an ambulance, and in November 1917 his vehicle took a near direct shell hit. “The hills of Verdun,” he wrote deliriously of the experience and his survival, “and the red sun setting back of the hills and the charred skeletons of trees and the river Meuse and the black shells spouting up in columns along the road to Bras and the thunder of the barrage and the wounded and the ride through red explosions and the violent metamorphose from boy into man.”

  Unlike Hemingway, who survived a similar attack at the cost of shrapnel in his legs, Crosby was untouched—except, perhaps, psychologically. The moment he could leave the service, he moved to Paris and began squandering his trust fund on opium, alcohol, sex, religion—he founded his own cult, revering the sun—even publishing. His companion, Polly Peabody, renamed herself Caresse and acquired a whippet called Clitoris. Together, they founded the Black Sun Press, pioneering the published-in-Paris movement.

  In 1929, returning to New York with his mistress, Crosby shot her in the head, then shot himself. He was thirty-one. transition, the magazine that published Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Hemingway’s early stories, as well as Crosby’s poems and photographs, ran an obituary by Kay Boyle. Her incoherence captured a sense of his fevered life but also that of Paris at war.

  There was no one who ever lived more consistently in the thing that was happening then. If he crossed the sea, it was never a stretch he looked upon as wide rolling water, but every drop of it stung in him because he did not know how to keep things outside himself; every rotting bit of wreck in it was heaped on his own soul, and every whale was his own sporting, spouting young adventure. If he went into retreat, into his own soul he would go, trailing this clattering, jangling universe with him, this ermine-trimmed, this moth-eaten, this wine velvet, the crown jewels on his forehead, the crown of thorns in his hand, into retreat, but never into escape.

  Not immune to the pleasures of Paris, even General Pershing enjoyed his creature comforts, living in a borrowed mansion with a garden at 73 rue de Varenne, close to the Hôtel des Invalides. It was there, as he awaited the first draft of troops, that he and his inner circle planned the United States’ involvement in the war.

  In their leisure hours, members of his staff, helped by their new acquaintances at the Union Interalliée, discovered fine dining and beautiful women. Harry Crosby’s diaries offer a commentary on the pleasures of a Paris where, increasingly, old rules no longer applied. In a gesture toward its expanding international clientele, the city’s most select brothel, La Chabanais, rebranded itself The House of All Nations. Crosby paid a visit, and gave his approval of “the Persian and the Russian and the Turkish and the Japanese and the Spanish rooms, and the bathroom with mirrored walls and mirrored ceilings, and the thirty harlots waiting in the salon.”

  The house prided itself on accommodating all tastes. Crosby saw “the flogging post where men came to flagellate young girls and where others (masochists) came to be flagellated.” Voyeurs satisfied themselves in a room with peepholes. Men who enjoyed entering a vagina lubricated with the semen of another were invited to wait in a rear corridor until the first client left, then slip in. By special arrangement, fetishists could enjoy the latest in glamorous sexual sensations—a hot omelette slid sizzling from the pan onto their nude body.

  The Crosbys also frequented an apartment on rue du Bois converted by a rastaquouère named Drosso into a luxurious fumerie. Caresse recalled “a series of small fantastic rooms, large satin divans heaped with pillows, walls covered with gold-embroidered arras, in the center of each room a low round stand on which was ranged all the paraphernalia of the pipe. By the side of each table, in coolie dress, squatted a little servant of the lamp. The air was sweet with the smell of opium.” After they changed into kimonos, Harry sprawled on a couch with one arm around a beautiful French girl. Caresse snuggled under the other.

  Drosso would cater private opium parties, bringing the drug to one’s home, along with all the paraphernalia. Attractive congees, or servants, kept the pipes filled, as well as providing other services to any guests not wishing to enter what Baudelaire called the “artificial paradise” of drugged dreams.

  To the French, one attraction of brothels and fumeries was the same as that of dinner parties: conversation. Men visited such places for the whole evening, or for days, and in some cases didn’t sample the pleasures of the house at all. Lulled by the relaxed atmosphere, the drugs, and the company of beautiful women, gentlemen might exchange useful confidences, even secrets. Under the law that forbade pimping, only a woman could manage a maison de tolérance, but the actual proprietors were businessmen, politicians, even artists—Marcel Proust was part owner of two homosexual maisons closes—who recognized information as a commodity more precious than money.

  Despite the execution of Mata Hari by a French firing squad in February 1917, nobody in Paris was unduly preoccupied with espionage. A wakeup call came toward the end of the year. Members of the American Field Service, including Hemingway, liked to gather at Harry’s New York Bar on rue Danou, near the Opéra. Nobody suspected eavesdroppers, but in January 1918 the manager, a Monsieur Tepé, was arrested and interrogated by the security services. Later that day, he was found dead in the street below an open window. Evidently, more was going on behind the scenes than anyone suspected. Even then, nobody took such things very seriously. There was a general feeling that, with the Americans having tossed their hat in the ring, the whole business would be over by Christmas. Writing in July, Albert Flament predicted, “The arrival of General Pershing will mark the definitive dispersal of those mists which, no matter when we looked, so heavily obscured our horizon.” Who could have foreseen that peace was still more than a year away, and that the hardest was yet to come?

  “Black Jack” and “Papa”—Pershing and Joffre.

  36

  Machines

  When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  Throughout the early summer of 1917, as Pershing refined his strategy and, in England, at the opposite end of importance, Archie Baxter hobb
led through a painful convalescence, the war crept closer to Paris.

  Bombing raids increased, often now at night. During a dinner at the Ritz hosted by Paul Morand’s fiancée and attended by the Beaumonts, Cocteau, and Proust, the lights went out. Morand wrote in his diary, “Searchlights in the starry skies from the direction of Le Bourget [military airfield]. Something like rockets; one by one the French planes climb up. Sirens wail.” To break the tension, Cocteau joked, “Somebody’s stepped on the toe of the Eiffel Tower, and it’s complaining.”

  Roland Garros

  A few nights after, at 10:00 p.m. on the evening of June 16, 1917, about twenty people gathered at Paul Morand’s apartment above the colonnades of the Palais-Royale. They’d been invited to the first reading by Cocteau of his new cycle of poems, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance.

  The guest list was distinguished—not surprising, since he’d compiled it. The event took place “under the high patronage” of his old companion in arms (and pajamas) Etienne de Beaumont, and wife. Their presence was appropriate, since Cocteau’s inspiration was the war: specifically, the war in the air. The poems were dedicated to his lover, the aviator Roland Garros, then a prisoner in Germany after having been shot down in Belgium. The Stars and Stripes published a harrowing account of his treatment in the prison camp at Küstrin.

  This unfortunate had been led about with his hands tied, guarded by four men, one of whom was an officer, unbound only when his physical needs demanded, then forced to keep his arms in a horizontal position and made to sleep face downwards. While at Küstrin, an order came from Berlin that he should respond every two hours to roll-call, even during the night. This aviator, dragged from camp to camp, allowed only ten minutes’ notice of departure, was submitted to such horrible torture that he asked the German government by letter to be shot.