The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The casualties for that one day, though smaller than during the great battles of the summer, had been painfully heavy. The French had lost, by Ducrot’s reckoning, 5,236 men, 4,000 of these around Villiers and Cœuilly alone, and the Germans 2,091. That night smart clubs on the Champs-Élysées and humble bistros alike mourned many a friend who had dined there only a few nights earlier. The commander of II Corps, old General Renault, who had seen half a century’s service, received his forty-fifth wound; his leg was amputated and after four days of delirium in which he raved constantly against Trochu, he died. One of the brigade commanders on Bowles’s front, La Charrière, had also been hit three times, and the third proved mortal. Colonel Franchetti, Ducrot’s most spirited cavalry leader, had been wounded by a stray shell, and died shouting deliriously, ‘Follow me, my friends! It’s hard, but we’ll get there. Vive la France!’ Captain de Neverlée, Ducrot’s emissary on October 31st, who had informed his friends on the eve of battle that he would not survive the morrow, fell gallantly before Villiers; and somewhere on the battlefield the mysterious, heroic commando Sergeant Hoff was missing. Ducrot, seen constantly galloping in front of the Prussians with a mad frenzy as if, knowing he could not return ‘victorious’, he were seeking a stray bullet, had had at least one horse killed under him. Trochu too experienced several miraculous escapes.

  All day the wounded had streamed back before the eyes of the shocked Parisians, with faces bearing (said Goncourt) ‘the horrible anxiety of their wounds, the uncertainty of amputation, the uncertainty of life or death’. They came in files of blood-bedaubed horse-drawn buses and in bateaux-mouches that deposited them on the quais of the Seine. Owing to the primitiveness of surgery in those days, exacerbated by the traditional ineptitude and squalor of French military hospitals, the badly-wounded knew they could rarely look forward to a happy outcome of their suffering. The plight of the wounded at the front was particularly appalling. Chaos among the ambulances had not helped. Felix Whitehurst, a British voluntary worker, noted that many had been sent out so full of attendants that there was room for only one casualty in each, and that at Champigny there had been such a jam as to prevent them deploying on to the field. Then there had been a disgraceful muddle over linen urgently required for 1,500 wounded at Nogent; Whitehurst had gone into Paris and, after a three-hour wrestle with French bureaucracy, got it—only to find on his return that the wounded had been moved on elsewhere. A French staff officer admitted to him that it ‘beats the worst mess of the worst days of the Crimea’. The Daily Telegraph corrrespondent recorded handing his cherished reserve of chocolate to a wretched casualty who had lain all night without receiving food, soup, or medical care, and many of the wounded whom it had been impossible to collect had been left out on the battlefield overnight, their wounds freezing in the sudden bitter cold. Prussian outposts were astonished to see French soldiers apparently more concerned to strip the horse carcasses of their last ounce of flesh, and root up a forgotten cabbage here and there, than to carry in their fallen comrades.

  Among the numerous ambulances (including those staffed by Americans and Britons, about which more will be said shortly) involved in this work of mercy, a colourful figure was to be found on the battlefield: Monseigneur Bauer, Archbishop of Syracuse and Chaplain-General to the Army. His had been an unusual career; born a Hungarian Jew, involved as a young man in the 1848 uprising in Vienna, he had then taken orders. In 1868, by now a naturalized Frenchman, he became Empress Eugénie’s personal confessor, and it was he who had blessed the Suez Canal. Renowned even during the Second Empire for gallantry of a distinctly un-ecumenical flavour, Mgr. Bauer ended up some thirty years later once again a layman, defrocked, and married to a beautiful young Jewish artist. Despite his links with the deposed regime, he enjoyed great popularity with the troops; possibly on account of his Rabelaisian qualities, as well as his considerable courage. On the Marne battlefield the prelate presented an admirable, but incongruous, figure; prancing about on horseback in long purple boots and breeches, with a broad-brimmed ecclesiastical hat on his head, a large gold crucifix and a diamond-studded order around his neck, and a huge episcopal ring on his finger. At his side rode a mounted ‘bodyguard’ of four ecclesiasts equally bizarre in their trappings, a standard-bearer holding aloft a banner with a large Red Cross, and under his command were several hundred lay Frères Chrétiens acting as stretcher-bearers. Tirelessly, and quite contemptuous of the Prussian bullets that came his way, he rode about the field directing the succour of the wounded. ‘He is’, said Labouchere (though it must have been second-hand, as that distinguished correspondent had not stirred far from his quarters in the Grand Hôtel during the battle) ‘as steady under fire as if he were in a pulpit’.

  But all the efforts of Mgr. Bauer and the various ambulances could not suffice to bring in more than a tithe of the agonizing wounded. The army was low on ammunition and it was clear to Ducrot that it was in no condition to renew the offensive, so on December 1st a twenty-four hour truce to remove the wounded was requested, and granted. Meanwhile the Prussians were preparing a massive counter-attack. They unleashed it the following morning, even before it was fully light. Ducrot was at his battle H.Q. giving orders to the chief of the Ambulances de la Presse, Ferdinand de Lesseps of Suez fame, when the cannonade broke out. Quickly he mounted his horse and rode off towards it. On the road to Champigny he met ‘an avalanche of vehicles, infantrymen, cavalry, all descending at full speed towards the Marne’. Somehow he managed to stop their flight, but the spectacle he found at Champigny itself was even more depressing; ‘… the Grande Rue is full of Mobiles, and soldiers of all arms, running in every direction; a ration convoy trying to advance adds still further to the disorder, the confusion;… words, exhortations, threats have no effect at all on this torrent of fugitives forever increasing…’ With awful regularity shells from Prussian big guns fell amid this tangle, exploding on the granite pavee with terrible effect. Bowles, who was once again on the spot, could find no other word for it than ‘a perfect rout’. Later, other French units managed to stage a rally and all day desperate fighting continued. But the next morning, under cover of a fog and the cannons of St.-Maur, Ducrot’s army evacuated its bridgeheads to recross the Marne.

  At 3.15 that afternoon, so the Prussian Crown Prince’s Chief of Staff, General von Blumenthal, noted in his journal, he received a telegram which ‘informed me that the enemy appears to be in retreat on Joinville….’ After dinner I played whist for the first time, and during the game had the unspeakable joy of receiving a message from Viebahn, telling of a brilliant victory won by the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg.’

  But in Paris the populace for a day or two still lived in the illusion that the break-out might yet take place, as the official communiqués were less than enlightening. On the disastrous day of December 3rd, a M. Patte was writing happily to a lady friend in London that ‘just now the guns make the most dreadful noise, but we hear it, I can say with pleasure, as it is the cannon which announces to us the deliverance…’. Not until the 5th was Ducrot’s admission of defeat manifest. It was a bright, cold, bracing morning. Not a drum was to be heard anywhere. Goncourt spoke for all Parisians when miserably he entered in his journal: ‘the heights and depths of hope; this is what kills you. One believes oneself saved. Then one realizes one is lost…. Today the recrossing of the Marne by Ducrot has thrown us back into the darkness of failure and despair.’

  The ebullient Ducrot himself was no further from despair. By the night of November 30th, he had already concluded that Paris herself was lost. After the battle there had been some bitter recriminations in the high command; General Blanchard, one of his corps commanders, had actually tried to provoke Ducrot to a duel by declaring (it was an allusion to the famous ‘dead or victorious’ proclamation) ‘I wish to know if your sword is as long as your tongue’. Ducrot had replied by offering his resignation, and requesting to revert to the ranks. The request was refused. Then, in the midst of all this misery and acrimony, on
December 5th yet another deadly blow descended. It was a letter from Moltke, addressed to Trochu, studiously polite, but informing him of the crushing defeat that Frederick-Charles and the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg had between them inflicted upon Gambetta’s divided forces, resulting in the recapture of Orléans.

  In three days the Great Sortie had cost 12,000 officers and men; it had failed, and at the same time the relieving army from Tours had been stopped in its tracks. The plight of Paris now seemed hopeless. But still the fear of Red revolution, combined with the revealed harshness of Prussian peace terms, purged any idea of capitulation from the minds of the Government. The Siege would go on, though since the supreme military effort had failed it would henceforth be merely a matter of survival and attrition.

  If the Government of National Defence could derive any consolation at all from the results of the Great Sortie, it was that it had at last managed to lay hands on the illusive firebrand, Flourens. In hiding since October 31st, he had heard that his Tirailleurs had been in action and had lost three men killed (presumably in the rout that Tommy Bowles had witnessed); impatiently he went off to join them at Maisons-Alfort, and was promptly arrested on his return to Paris by order of General Thomas. But the seizure of Flourens was of itself a petty enough success.

  Could Le Plan ever have succeeded? Could anything have lifted the Siege by November? Military history frowns upon ‘ifs’, but it does seem that if Tours and Paris could have co-operated in Ducrot’s original plan, and it had taken place, as projected, within the first fortnight of November (i.e. before the arrival of Frederick-Charles), the break through to Le Havre might well have succeeded. Even once the plan had been switched Gambetta’s forces might, if properly handled, also have reached Fontainebleau in time to help Ducrot; but whether Ducrot could ever have got that far remains open to doubt. The strategy of the second plan was fundamentally at fault; breaking out across the Marne, Ducrot would have had his flanks open to German attacks on both sides all the way to Fontainebleau, and would probably have been destroyed between the Marne and Seine. Bismarck, who had seen this, remarked calmly on hearing of the sortie on November 30th ‘Where could they go?…. They would put their heads in a sack. Such an attempt would be the best thing that could happen for us.’

  Despite Bismarck’s confidence, however, the French attempt had succeeded in throwing the Prussian military leaders into considerable alarm for a short time, aware as they were of the tenuousness of their siege ring about Paris. At Versailles, there had been serious talk of crisis measures to be taken in the contingency of a break-out, and, though light in comparison to French casualty figures, the fresh losses suffered so long after the war had seemed over at Sedan made an unpleasant mark in German minds. For weariness over the prolongation of the war had set in both at home and at the front, and perhaps for this reason alone there existed some purpose in the Paris forces keeping up an aggressive attitude for as long as they were able.

  The American Ambulance at Work on the Battlefield

  11. The Outsiders Within

  As the war dragged on, and Prussia showed herself apparently incapable of bringing it to a speedy conclusion, there was an additional fear never very far from Bismarck’s mind. Might others among the great powers be tempted to intervene, and thus rob the Germans of the completeness of victory?

  The Austro-Hungarians, still mindful of their chastisement at Sadowa, had made it clear they would only enter the war on the condition (unfulfilled) of early French victories; thus it was the ever-unpredictable British on whom Bismarck kept an eye, with the other squinting over his shoulder at the Russians behind him. At the beginning of the war, there had been widespread sympathy in Britain for the Germans—from the top down. Queen Victoria acclaimed her son-in-law Fritz’s first victory over MacMahon at Frœschviller as ‘wonderful news’, while Lady Russell in a letter to Kate Amberley1 commenting on Sedan exclaimed, ‘Thank God that punishment has fallen on the right hand!’ But since Sedan there had been a distressing reversal of British public opinion, perhaps summarized in a letter Lady Amberley received from an English radical towards the end of the Siege: ‘Abt the war I think the Prussians were right at 1st but in its present phase my sympathies are intensely & most painfully French.’ Sir Charles Dilke, M.P., who had visited the August battlefields under Prussian auspices, declared, ‘I began to wish to desert when we saw how overbearing success had made the Prussians and how determined they were to push their successes to a point at which France would have been made impotent in Europe….’ By November both the prolonged resistance of suffering Paris and Gambetta’s courageous efforts in the provinces had begun to play strongly upon traditional British compassion for the underdog. In London there were manifestations in favour of British assistance to France, and the iconoclastic Bradlaugh had found several excuses to hit out at the Queen’s Germanic ties. Even The Times had been provoked into protesting against German brutality, and such ardent francophobes as Thomas Carlyle were finding themselves increasingly isolated.

  More and more the thoughtful in Britain suffered from concern at the true scope of Prussian ambitions, as revealed by the bombastic utterances of her leaders, and at the kind of Europe that would emerge from the war. In December the Illustrated London News wrote:

  The war may or not be over when Paris shall have capitulated…. But it will not have ended in another sense, when the peace shall have been signed…. It may be neither next year nor the year after that the lessons of the last two months will bear fruit, but that they will bear it we have no doubt at all….

  In an even more remarkable prophecy, Karl Marx predicted from Highgate as early as September that any German victory which led to the dismemberment of France would inevitably end ‘by forcing France into the arms of Russia’, followed by a new war of revenge; ‘and’, he added in a letter of the same month, ‘a war No. 2 of this kind will act as the midwife to the inevitable social revolution in Russia’.

  Dilke, a radical supporter of the Gladstone Liberal Government, held that ‘if Gladstone had been a great man’ and had threatened to intervene with the Royal Navy against whichever side attacked the other, the Franco-Prussian War would never have broken out. (One might well speculate as to whether, had Dilke’s advice been taken, 1914 too would not then have been averted—or at least postponed.) But in July Gladstone had determined upon neutrality, and as the war progressed—whatever the pressures of public opinion at home—nothing would deflect him from his steadfast course. To one of Jules Favre’s emissaries, Frédéric Reitlinger, who reached England at the time of the Great Sortie, the Grand Old Man had sermonized (according to Reitlinger): ‘War is a terrible disaster for humanity. Are there any circumstances which may justify a Government throwing a country into war?…’ His Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, had added: ‘we have neither the right nor the power to interfere in an affair which does not concern us’; and ‘France has given an exhibition of military courage which has aroused the admiration of the world, but there is also a civil courage which a great people must not neglect, and which is even greater and more admirable than military courage.’ Such was the tenor of British policy in those days, and even the subsequent sinking by German action of five British colliers in the lower Seine, which aroused widespread anger in Britain, was not sufficient to alter it.1

  From Bismarck’s point of view the gravest risk of outside intervention (and, for Britain, the most serious threat to her standard of neutrality in Europe) came at the end of October from the other end of Europe. Russia, admittedly to some extent provoked by Bismarck himself, decided to seize the opportunity of denouncing the clauses in the 1856 Treaty of Paris which neutralized the Black Sea. The two powers responsible for enforcing this legacy of the Crimean War were Britain and France; Britain’s naval position in the Eastern Mediterranean seemed threatened, and she was faced with the prospect of once more fighting Russia, but this time—with France otherwise occupied—alone. To Bismarck, anxious to keep the war—and the peace—a strictly
bilateral affair, any spread of hostilities would have been most undesirable. Instead he proposed a conference, which was accepted by the powers concerned. But such a conference would also, he realized, have proved injurious to Prussian interests in so far as it must almost certainly have led to a general attempt by the European powers to settle the Franco-German dispute; which in turn might well mean a ‘soft’ peace for France, with no annexations. Bismarck wanted to deal with France by himself. Thus, with his usual diplomatic cunning, he temporized; chiefly through placing a multiplicity of obstacles in the way of any French delegate attending the London Conference until victory was in the bag.