In advocating their wares, the inventors could be most persuasive; even so sceptical an observer as Tommy Bowles appears to have been impressed by the ‘frock-coated, keen-eyed little chemist, who has within his knowledge more effectual and terrible methods of warfare than all the cocked-hats in Europe ever covered’. He assured Bowles that he had invented a devastating explosive which he claimed could ‘blow the Prussian Army off the face of the earth’, as well as a ‘means of decomposing water itself, and turning it into consuming flames’. (The encounter prompted Bowles to prophesy, a little optimistically, that ‘when war becomes a mere duel of skill between chemists its glory is gone, and, when the risk of it is so enormously increased, its attractions will disappear as well’). The Paris Press was particularly susceptible to the most Laputan projects, and a great clamour was aroused in the papers when the Scientific Committee declined the ‘invention’ that would have decomposed the air around the stricken Prussians.
As noted in another chapter, many of these—such as the ‘sympathetic snails’, a design for a ‘hot-water rifle’, and the unleashing of the lions from the zoo—originated from the fetid atmosphere of the Red Clubs, and as often as not received the ardent support of Pyat’s Le Combat. But none was more exotic than Jules Allix’s ‘doigts prussiques’: pins dipped (appropriately) in prussic acid, with which the women of Paris could defend their virtue. These were to be ancillary to a remarkable corps created by Félix Belly, called the ‘Amazons of the Seine’.2 In October, the British correspondents had all been intrigued by recruiting placards that had sprung up on walls throughout Paris. The redoubtable ladies were to be dressed in black pantaloons with orange stripes, a black hooded blouse, a black képi with an orange band, and a cartridge pouch slung across the shoulder. Armed with a rifle, their intended role was ‘to defend the ramparts and the barricades, and to afford to the troops in the ranks of which they will be distributed all the domestic and fraternal services compatible with moral order and military discipline’. Ten battalions were to be raised, and their expenses were to be met by a ‘sacrifice’ on the part of the ‘Amazons’’ richer sisters of bracelets and jewellery. Enrolments would be accepted at 36 Rue Turbigo, said the proclamations, which were signed ‘Le Chef Provisoire du premier bataillon, FÉLIX BELLY.’ The Amazons were quickly wedded by Allix to his ‘doigt prussique’, which he reasoned was a more feminine weapon than a rifle, describing its usage as follows: ‘The Prussian advances towards you—you put forth your hand, you prick him—he is dead, and you are pure and tranquil’. Alas, although Belly claimed 15,000 applications, this fearful secret weapon never materialized. The Government, less concerned by the implications of the ‘fraternal services’ which the Amazons were to perform at the front than by the fact that Belly was apparently collecting enrolment ‘fees’, intervened. For a while, however, Paris at least had something to laugh about; Belly disappeared from sight; Allix later represented the 8th arrondissement in the Commune and ended up in a lunatic asylum.
Belly, if the allegations were true, was not alone in utilizing the inventive craze as a means of personal aggrandisement. One resourceful Parisian made handsome profits through a factory manufacturing false ‘trophies’ of war, where he produced Prussian Pickelhauben and sabres by the score, as well as forging ‘next-of-kin’ letters that were certified to have been removed from a Prussian corpse; and O’Shea remembered an ‘ingenious rascal with a bandaged head who paraded a pair of human ears in a jar of spirits of wine on the boulevards, and brought down a flush of coppers by making believe that they were his own, sliced off by the Barbarous Prussians’.
As the orators of the Clubs produced one fantastical invention after another, so the great intellects of France in the various Academies occupied their time with equal irrelevancies. Carrying on its usual curriculum of discussions on medieval grammar and Coptic characters, the nearest the Academy of Inscriptions and Letters came to contemporary affairs was a lecture in November on ‘The Provisioning of Besieged Towns in Antiquity’; while the Academy of Science busied itself with such topics as differential equations and the eclipse of the sun.
By and large, apart from the balloon and pigeon post, the inventors of Paris gave birth to little that was of practical use during the Siege. There were perhaps no more than three such developments: a primitive armoured train, powerful electrical searchlights which were employed to protect the Paris forts against surprise attack by night, and an unpalatable synthetic foodstuff called osseine derived from bone and gelatine. In fact, the greatest achievements lay in the production of more conventional weapons, such as cannon, mitrailleuses, and rifles, during the Siege, and for this the credit belongs to one man: Dorian, the Minister of Works. In more ways than one, Dorian—a peacetime industrialist—proved himself to be the outstanding member of the Trochu Government, and as an organizer he was unexcelled. Under him, every available workshop and factory in Paris was set to producing munitions; the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers became a vast cannon plant; and even along the smart Rue de Rivoli the sound of hammering came from basement windows where weapons were being forged. Great ingenuity was used to circumvent grave shortages in raw materials; steel was replaced by alloys of bronze and tin, there was even talk of using that new rare metal, aluminium, and somehow saltpetre for gunpowder was recovered from old plaster. Even the bells of St.-Denis Cathedral were melted down. By the end of September, Dorian’s workshops were already turning out 300,000 cartridges a day, and when the Siege ended no less than 400 cannon and a large number of mitrailleuses had been manufactured in Paris. Haste and carelessness led to a series of disastrous accidents in powder-mills (one apparently caused by a plumber soldering on the roof), and it was later claimed that many of the breech-loading guns were unsafe; but—since most of the arms plants had been shifted to the provinces before September, and equipment had to be improvised—it is perhaps remarkable that anything was produced at all. No less remarkable was the means of financing the cannon, some two hundred of which were subsidized through popular subscription, launched by Victor Hugo. The inhabitants of the poorer, ‘Red’, arrondissements considered that many of these had actually been ‘bought’ by them, and their pride in the results of their sacrifices was justifiably immense. In mid-December a National Guardsman wrote to his sister in the provinces that these cannon were now being delivered at a rate of twenty-one a day: ‘you know that’s really something, every five days, a hundred guns….’ It was also to become one of the immediate causes of the outbreak of Civil War when the Siege ended.
Wounded in the Théâtre-français
9. ‘Le Plan’
WITH the ‘Red’ leaders in gaol, awaiting a possible death sentence, the greatest danger confronting Trochu’s conduct of the war—that of a revolution inside Paris—seemed to have been averted. Belleville was sullenly in check; but for how long? Yet, as November arrived and the Siege approached the end of its second month, neutrals inside Paris sensed a distinct plunge in morale. On November 6th, Labouchere reported: ‘I never remember to have witnessed a day of such general gloom since the commencement of the Siege. The feeling of despair is, I hear, still stronger in the army.’ Gloom had thoroughly infected Labouchere himself; should a peace be signed on the latest Prussian terms, wrenching Alsace-Lorraine away from France, he predicted: ‘within ten years we shall infallibly be dragged into a Continental war’. Only in the date did he err. On November 12th, Washburne wrote despondently: ‘I might as well stop my diary, for there is absolutely nothing to put down. There are now no military, nor even political movements, the streets are becoming more and more vacant and the people more and more sober…’ To maintain morale, the Paris Press had to fall back as a surrogate for more striking events on the doings of one Sergeant Ignatius Hoff of the 107th of the Line. Hoff was a shadowy figure who, employing Mohican tactics, specialized—like a latter-day commando—in the nocturnal throat-slitting of German sentries. Each night he returned with a collection of Pickelhauben, and by November his alle
ged tally had reached twenty-seven. He was swiftly built up into an almost legendary hero; much as air aces like the great Guynemer were singled out for beatification from the amorphous carnage of the First World War.
But even the exploits of Sergeant Hoff could not suffice to distract Parisians from the uglier facts of life that were now becoming apparent for the first time. In his entry for November 12th, Washburne added: ‘During the last few days the suffering has greatly increased.’ It was true; about the same time Tommy Bowles recorded an ominously symptomatic observation. He had been watching fishermen haul in a seine net from a lake at the Bois de Boulogne. Not a fish was in it. The following day he was reporting that milk had run out, and on the 16th Washburne wrote: ‘Fresh meat is getting almost out of the question…. They have begun on dogs, cats, and rats…. The gas is also giving out.’ One of the first to try the new fare was Labouchere, who rated his introductory salmi de rat as ‘excellent—something between frog and rabbit’. But it was still a novelty. Yet another grim aspect of siege life—the threat of epidemics—began to intrude itself upon the scene; already during one week of November smallpox had claimed five hundred victims.1
All this, coming so soon after October 31st’s revelation of public discontent, made even Trochu realize that something had to be done swiftly and dramatically. The time had come for a major military effort. But where, and how?
For some time the wags of Paris had been talking about ‘le plan Trochu’. It was a word he was extremely fond of; even when he sat down to a game of piquet (according to Labouchere) he would warn his opponents, ‘‘f’ai mon plan’, and if he lost he would leave the table grumbling, ‘nevertheless, my plan was a good one’. A little ditty was beginning to make the rounds:
Je sais le plan de Trochu,
Plan, plan, plan, plan, plan!
Mon Dieu! Quel beau plan!
Je sais le plan de Trochu:
Grâce à lui rien n’est perdu.1
Later, a story was also put around by Trochu’s enemies that he had confided his mysterious ‘plan’ into the hands of his lawyer, but in fact the documents when examined proved to be a blank! Trochu in his memoirs hotly denies this slander; admitting, with perfect truth, that he had never had any plan at all.
Indeed, in so far as there was any military plan, it was Ducrot’s. There was no one in 1870 more representative of the best tradition of French generals than Ducrot; ardent, courageous to a fault, enterprising, but seldom rewarded by success. In 1914 he would have been and out-and-out supporter of Foch; in Algeria of the 1950’s, of General Massu and perhaps even of the O.A.S. He was a true disciple of l’attaque à outrance. Before the war Ducrot had warned Louis-Napoleon that the Army was not ready to fight Prussia, but that if war were inevitable the only way to win would be with a Blitzkrieg through the southern states of Germany. Captured with the Emperor at Sedan, the humiliation had driven him to escape, in circumstances which Bismarck claimed constituted a breach of parole. He was, in Trochu’s words, ‘un véritable homme de guerre’, and ever since the setback at Châtillon he had been champing at the bit to lead a major action. In the earliest days of the Siege, Trochu and Ducrot had both agreed (erroneously) that the forces in the provinces would never amount to much, and that, therefore, if the Prussian ring round Paris were to be burst, this would have to be done from the inside. There were three points which seemed to offer the best prospects of a breakthrough: between the Marne and the Seine to the south-east of Paris; on the Plain of St.-Denis to the north; and across the peninsula formed by the meanderings of the Seine at Gennevilliers to the north-west, one of the favourite painting grounds of the Impressionists. Of these, Ducrot considered the last alone combined both tactical and strategical advantages. The investing enemy forces in the Gennevilliers peninsula were less securely organized, and once their lines there had been pierced Ducrot’s men would find themselves in unoccupied, friendly territory, which would not be the case in other directions. Moving north-westwards along the Basse-Seine via Rouen, Ducrot would then reach out for Le Havre, gaining a port through which Paris could be revictualled, linked with the French Armies of the provinces, and perhaps even supplied with fresh arms from overseas.
Such was Ducrot’s ‘plan’. He had, he says, just completed his studies of it when he heard, on October 7th, of Gambetta’s flight out of Paris. Immediately he presented the plan to Trochu. The pessimistic Trochu was by now thoroughly convinced that no attempt at breakthrough would succeed, but for want of any better suggestion both he and his Chief of Staff, General Schmitz, accepted Ducrot’s plan in principle, which henceforth became ‘le plan Trochu’. Ducrot was allowed to go ahead with preparations, to the extent of carrying out a limited operation at Malmaison on October 21st that aimed at securing the left flank of the breakthrough. It was tentatively planned that the attempt should be made between November 15th and 20th, by which time Ducrot (whose chief concern still lay in the quality of his troops) hoped to have a corps of fifty to sixty thousand well-trained men available. Meanwhile Trochu—until October 31st—remained sceptical towards the plan’s probability of success and phlegmatic in his efforts to push it, even hesitating to comply with Ducrot’s requests that Gambetta be kept fully informed about the operation. The ‘Red’ uprising, however, was enough to alarm Trochu into backing Le Plan with new zest.
But before Le Plan could go any further, all was upturned with a sudden, miraculous piece of news from Tours.
* * *
After his departure from Paris on October 7th, Gambetta had had an eventful flight. The balloon sailed over the Prussian lines at less than 2,000 feet, its occupants watching nervously while enemy riflemen below took pot shots at them. Hastily throwing out ballast, the pilot rose to safer altitudes before any harm could be done. After a few hours, he opened the gas valve and attempted to land on an empty space, but peasants came running up to warn the balloonists that they were in Prussian-occupied territory. They took off and later, spotting a group of men who looked like franc-tireurs, tried to land again. These were in fact Prussians. Fortunately their arms were stacked, and by the time they could grab them the balloon was rising rapidly once more; however, a bullet actually grazed Gambetta’s hand. After this hair-raising escape, the pilot allowed some time to elapse before trying a third landing. Eventually they came down near Montdidier, at 3.30 p.m., and just a quarter of an hour ahead of the Uhlans. Despite his unnerving experiences, that same evening Gambetta issued a rousing proclamation, announcing his arrival, and calling the provinces to arms. Within forty-eight hours of his arrival at Tours, far exceeding the powers accorded him by Trochu, he had taken over the Ministry of War from old Crémieux while remaining Minister of the Interior, thus establishing himself as a virtual dictator. As his right-hand man he appointed Charles de Freycinet, only a little older than himself and almost equal to him in boldness and will-power. A civil engineer, Freycinet shared Gambetta’s civilian contempt for the orthodox military who had heretofore proved themselves so singularly unsuccessful in their own profession. He was a brilliant organizer, though neither this talent nor his and Gambetta’s combined spirit and drive could quite compensate for their lack of military know-how.
The situation which Gambetta and Freycinet inherited in October was hardly an encouraging one. The peasantry in unoccupied France was largely indifferent to the struggle; since the fall of the Empire, political wounds had reopened everywhere, with Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Republicans all clawing at each other. Many of the local authorities were still run by ardent, conservative supporters of Louis-Napoleon, who showed a reluctance to heed instructions emanating from the Republican Delegation at Tours. In the big cities, such as Lyons and Marseilles, there had been serious ‘Red’ disorders similar to that of October 31st in Paris. And there were also the same heated conflicts between the regular Army and those who urged the creation of Republican National Guard Forces. Gambetta, in one of his earliest reports back to Paris, wrote disgustedly: ‘The country districts are inert,
the bourgeoisie in the small towns are cowardly, and the military administration either passive, or desperately slow.’ Inside the occupied areas, harsh and Teutonically thorough repressions of franc-tireurs and telegraph line-cutters, coupled with heavy fines levied upon the communities where they were active, had terrorized the inhabitants. Yet, in fact, this occupied territory still only amounted to a small fraction of the vast surface of France. Beyond the German lines of investment around Paris, all of the country to the south, south-west, and west remained free; as did most of the north, too, as far as Amiens and even further. It contained a reservoir of anything up to a million men of military age, which could be tapped. Moreover, the pinning-down of Moltke’s forces around Paris and Metz provided valuable time for the provinces to regain their breath, and their morale—and for Gambetta to reorganize.
Despite the failure of his predecessors, the ‘Old Men of Tours’, to cope with the Augean problems confronting them, Gambetta’s impact was immediate. He drove his senior generals to daily despair, but between them he and Freycinet miraculously raised armies with a speed which the generals could never have achieved; certainly far beyond anything that Trochu or Ducrot had anticipated.1 Volunteers from all over France flowed into Tours, ‘their chests bristling with enormous daggers’, and arms began to arrive from depots all over the country—as well as from Britain and America. Above all, Gambetta, with his meridional passion, his Churchillian invective, managed to instil into his forces something that had been long lacking in France—the will to win. After General de la Motte Rouge on October 11th had lost Orléans to the Bavarian General von der Tann with only 28,000 men, Gambetta immediately sacked him, threatened him with court martial, and replaced him with General d’Aurelle de Paladines. A divisional commander in the Crimea, Aurelle had a magical touch with his troops that made him appear to be the perfect complement to Gambetta. By the beginning of November he had transformed a beaten, demoralized rabble into something resembling an Army; meanwhile, the Germans, their lines precariously extended in pursuit of what must have seemed to them little more than a colonial punitive expedition, were committing mistake after mistake unworthy of the great Moltke.
The Fall of Paris Page 20