The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  In these fortifications, life was reasonably agreeable and secure. Occasionally nightfall brought an unpleasant shock when someone infringed the strict blackout precautions; but otherwise French shellfire did little to upset the leisurely routine of life. Out of the line, the besiegers spent their time pleasantly enough, rowing on the lake at Enghien or skating when the winter set in, or just goggling at the wonders of Versailles. At first, as the Parisians by driving in all herds and collecting all food within range of the metropolis had created a kind of ‘scorched earth’, provisions had been scarce and extremely expensive. But the admirable quartermasters of the Prussian Army soon had an efficient system of supplies flowing direct from the Fatherland. Army rations were supplemented with regular parcels of Wurst, smoked cheese, and tobacco from sweethearts and well-wishers at home. Archibald Forbes, the correspondent of the Daily News with the Saxon forces to the north of Paris, recorded eating as guest of the 103rd Regiment in the front line a sumptuous Christmas dinner comprising sardines, caviare, various kinds of Wurst, boiled beef and macaroni, roast mutton, and ending with luxuries long unheard of inside Paris—cheese, fresh butter, and fruit. By comparison with the well-being of the Saxons, he was deeply moved by the suffering of French prisoners taken at Le Bourget, ‘so ravenous with hunger that the men grubbed in the gutter after turnip-tops and bones, and turned over dirt-heaps in search of stray crusts of bread.’

  For the Germans, excellent wine ‘liberated’ from French cellars was also plentiful. But, despite this looting of cellars—the prerogative of the conqueror everywhere—gratuitous vandalism was not excessive. When the Siberian cold of December struck, doors, furniture, panelling, and sometimes even grand pianos were smashed up for firewood. This was, however, a common necessity of war in which—as many an absentee French household discovered to his sorrow after the Siege—his own side was by no means retrograde; Edwin Child himself records in his diary for December how, during the freeze-up he and others of his company of the National Guard demolished an entire railway station to provide fuel. On the whole, the besiegers were well behaved and relations with the inhabitants could have been much worse. At Versailles, even a Frenchwoman confided to Russell that ‘much as she detested the Prussians, she must admit that a woman could walk with greater immunity from affront along the Boulevards after dark than she could have done when the French troops were in garrison’. But, as many Prussians discovered, molestation was superfluous; in a time of hunger blandishments of chocolate and sugar have a remarkable way of purchasing smiles—if not more. So morale was excellent—and so was the troops’ health, at least until the end of December.

  Bismarck had made his first Siege headquarters in the Rothschilds’ Château de Ferrières, where he received Jules Favre at the end of September. In the grounds there was a statue to Austria beneath which some ardent pan-Germanist had inscribed ‘Heil dir Germania! Thy children are all one!’ and in a washerwoman’s cottage Bismarck’s entourage had been amused to find a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Bismarck himself had been less amused when the Rothschild steward insisted there was no wine in the house, for he claimed that to his certain knowledge ‘there were more than 17,000 bottles’. However, the fabulous game-birds in the park at Ferrières offered compensation, and soon the steward proved more compliant. Bismarck’s secretary, Dr. Moritz Busch, who kept a detailed account of the great man’s tabletalk, reveals that when he was not throwing out brutally cynical observations on how to deal with France, or complaining at his treatment by Moltke and the King, or discoursing on the joys of hunting in his native Pomerania, conversation tended to revolve round the theme of food. At length the Iron Chancellor would propound to his court his special recipes for roast oysters; grumble that once upon a time he could devour eleven hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, but now he could only manage three; boast how in his diplomatic training he and his fellows practised drinking three-quarters of a bottle of champagne while negotiating. ‘They drank the weak-headed ones below the table, then they asked them all sorts of things… and forced them to make all sorts of concessions… then they made them sign their names….’ It was a revealing insight into the art of ‘blood and iron’ diplomacy.

  Early in October, somewhat reluctantly, Bismarck moved his headquarters to Versailles, where the King had already set up court. There the gluttonous obsession with the pleasures of his vast stomach continued, spiced by a liberal flow of offerings from adulators at home that prompted the faithful Busch to make entries like the following: ‘Today’s dinner was graced by a great trout pasty, the love-gift of a Berlin restaurant-keeper, who sent the Chancellor of the Confederation a cask of Vienna March beer along with it, and—his own photograph!’ Even within Paris, few can have been so concerned with what they were eating: ‘December 8th… we had omelettes with mushrooms, and, as several times previously, pheasant and sauerkraut boiled in champagne….’ ‘December 13th… we had turtle soup, and among other delicacies, a wild boar’s head and a compote of raspberry jelly and mustard, which was excellent’. By comparison with some of these bizarre collations, a simple salmi de rat might almost have seemed more digestible, and at times even Bismarck rebelled. On December 21st he interrupted a mealtime discussion on the French sortie of the previous day to exclaim: ‘There is always a dish too much. I had already decided to ruin my stomach with goose and olives, and here is Reinfeld ham, of which I cannot help taking too much, merely because I want to get my own share…. And here is Varzin wild boar, too!’ At times the table talk ran to speculation on the bill of fare of the besieged, with one learned Herr Doktor dictating that elephant’s trunk must be ‘something like the tongue, and must taste like tongue’. Lightly the talk would stray to thoughts of cannibalism, to which Bismarck contributed: ‘I believe I have read that they prefer women, who are, at least, not of their own sex….’

  Such was the way in which, while Parisians drew in their belts ever tighter, life went on in the arch-enemy’s household.

  For all his gluttony, however, there was a certain Puritan simplicity about Bismarck’s existence. Edward Blount who dined with him after the Siege noted that ‘wax candles for instance, were stuck into black wine bottles; in one corner was a hard-looking camp-bed….’ It was a simplicity shared by the Prussian royal court which had installed itself at Versailles, amid all the relics of extravaganza of the Roi Soleil. Of this kingdom in a saddle which had followed the victorious armies from the Rhine, all the principal components were present. There was the old King himself, august, courteous, usually to be seen dressed in Wellington boots, regimental overalls and a double-breasted uniform frock-coat, buttoned up to the throat; austerity in his early life had left with him a curiously unroyal habit of marking the level of wine left in the bottle at the end of each meal, and until quite late in life he had made do without a bathroom in his palace in Berlin. There was the Crown Prince of Prussia, a noble, bearded figure, smoking a short pipe that bore a royal eagle on its porcelain bowl. He was, for a Teutonic knight, strangely haunted by humanitarian anxieties1 that set him apart from his fellows, and so restless that members of his staff complained they never had a chance to sit down in the evening. There was the stern-faced, moustachioed Minister of War, General von Roon, and of course there was the brooding genius who had brought them all to Versailles: Moltke, upon whose smooth, monastic features Russell of The Times could never look without being reminded of a ‘calculating machine’. And everywhere—‘as plenty as blackberries’, wrote one Englishwoman—were the kings and princes, grand dukes and dukes, landgraves and margraves of the lesser states and principalities of Germany, each determined that their share in the greater glory of Prussia should not be neglected. A young Yorkshireman, Charlie Carter, thought ‘all the swells… as healthy and stunning as possible’, but what impressed Charles Ryan, an American surgeon, was their essential homeliness; how they ‘walked about the streets munching alternately a piece of raw ham or sausage from one hand’. The businesslike, rather sombre display of the Prussian
leaders had also struck Russell the moment he had arrived at Versailles; in contrast with the glittering French troops he had seen, there was ‘little lace of gold or silver; but little glitter, save of button, spur, or scabbard…’.

  Versailles was thoroughly, incongruously pervaded by the Lutheran spirit. The Crown Prince recalled how, when he had first arrived in September, his army had held an open field service of thanksgiving at the foot of the great terrace: ‘I think Louis XIV would have turned in his grave…. We sang the same hymn, ‘In Allen Meinen Taten’, that was chanted before marching off for the front on July 31st at Spires’. In the private chapel of Louis XIV, the royal entourage regularly attended sermons imbued with a great deal of the Sword of Gideon. All the ground-floor galleries of the great palace had been turned into a hospital and were filled with wounded Germans. The air was filled with the terrible odour of gangrene, and Bismarck raged at the poor medical conditions that prevailed; ‘… the rooms were cold, because they were not allowed to be heated for fear of spoiling the pictures on the walls. As if the life of a single soldier were not worth more than all the lumber of pictures in the château….’ Burials were frequent, and the French populace grew accustomed to the military bands playing the solemn strains of ‘Wie Wohl ist Mir, O Freund der Seelen’. On the sacred lawns outside the palace, where hitherto it had been almost a crime to set foot, the King and his staff unconcernedly exercised their horses. There were decoration ceremonies at the nearby Château Beauregard, once the home of Louis-Napoleon’s mistress, Miss Howard. Every day there was a steady stream of visitors: American and British generals, frock-coated politicians from Germany, and portraitists come to paint the leaders against suitable backdrops of the city of Paris at their feet.

  To a casual visitor, life at Versailles as the Siege dragged on gave the appearance of calm monotony. But beneath the surface, all was far from calm. First of all there was the overriding political problem of German unity, closer to Bismarck’s heart than any of the more immediate issues raised by the war. Assiduously he had been working behind the scenes to get the German states to agree to cap the triumph over France by promoting the King of Prussia to be Emperor of all Germans, thereby achieving the ultimate goal in his work of unification. Worry over the recalcitrance of Southern Germany had begun to affect Bismarck physically; his varicose veins, which had troubled him during the Austro-German war, were once again giving him pain. Negotiations with the Bavarians, he complained to the faithful Busch, had nearly collapsed on the most trivial of points; ‘You would never guess; it was the question of collars or epaulets.’ Then, on November 23rd, an excited Chancellor visited Busch:

  ‘We have got our German unity, and our Emperor!’ There was silence for a moment. Then I begged to be allowed to take the pen, with which he had signed the document…. Two empty champagne bottles stood on the table. ‘Bring us another’, said the Chief to a servant, ‘it is a great occasion.’

  But it was still far from plain sailing. When the old King first heard of the suggestion, according to his heir, it ‘put His Majesty quite beside himself with displeasure… [he] held that the matter came just as the most inopportune time possible’…. Bismarck grumbled that he would remain in office not one hour after the war ended, and there was repeated speculation as to whether the Iron Chancellor might be about to retire. However, on New Year’s Day, Archibald Forbes heard the chaplain of a Saxon division preach words that in contexts of a later epoch would have a peculiarly sinister ring: ‘Already one race, one people, we are now one nation….’ Bismarck had got his Empire.

  Then came the question of German peace aims. What should France be made to pay for Louis-Napoleon’s war? Moltke and the victorious General Staff, supported by public opinion at home, wanted the whole of Alsace-Lorraine, the fair cities of Metz and Strasbourg. Bismarck, with those far-sighted pale-blue eyes fixed on the distant future, saw the dangers to Germany of having a revanchiste France on her frontier, spoiling for an opportunity to grab back the lost territories. But the generals countered that the farther this frontier could be pushed back, the safer Germany would be. On this issue, Bismarck—and, later, a whole generation of European youth—were to be the losers.

  Bitter divisions had also arisen over the actual conduct of the war, as it had dragged on and on beyond the capitulation at Sedan. Somehow at Versailles the spirit of the court of Louis XV, its intrigues and jealousies, had infected those stolid Teutons. When his thrusting but successful cousin, Prince Frederick-Charles, was created a field-marshal, the Crown Prince questioned peevishly: ‘For how long will the possesion of this rank he has laid claim to satisfy his boundless ambition and overweening vanity?’ Moltke was at odds with Roon, because he could not keep pace with demands for men and material. All the soldiers were in conflict with Bismarck, and many of them viewed the Crown Prince with suspicion, considering him too tender-hearted, and circulating ugly whispers as to the English-Liberal influence of his wife, Queen Victoria’s daughter. The High Command no longer presented a picture of a well-oiled machine with all its components running in smooth unison, presided over by an infallible ‘calculating machine’, and harnessed to a task the achievement of which was a foregone conclusion. Fears of grave military reverses were never far away. None of this could of course be seen by the hard-pressed French; had Trochu been granted the gift of omniscience he might well have been persuaded to follow more energetically (though he declared it was constantly in his thoughts) the maxim of Suffren: ‘Allez jusqu’à votre dernier coup de canon, c’est peut-être celui-là qui sera le salut’.1

  To begin with, at Versailles, chosen more for reasons of prestige than of strategy, the Prussian High Command felt itself constantly menaced, with the least French activity to the west of Paris capable of causing panic. Then, as long as there were substantial French armies at large in the provinces and another army intact in Paris, Prussian minds would be nagged by the fear of being caught between two fires. In early November, when Aurelle was registering his initial successes round Orléans, there had been serious talk at Moltke’s headquarters of raising the Siege of Paris. Complaining of ‘the inexpressibly distressing manner in which the operations of our armies are being conducted’, von Blumenthal wrote at the time that ‘the King fancies our own position in front of Paris to be extremely hazardous and will not sanction any troops being sent away. I have not been so depressed for a long time.’ The prospect of having to lift the blockade was again voiced, briefly, during Ducrot’s attempt to break out at the end of November. On December 16th, when Faidherbe was active round Amiens, the Crown Prince, who shared to the full his father’s gloom about the way the war was going, entered in his diary: ‘It looks more and more as though our military situation is once more to become critical in the north, as it already is in the south…. His Majesty’s outlook on the immediate future is of the blackest….’ The recuperative powers of the French, as exploited by Gambetta, repeatedly dismayed him: ‘It is positively amazing how quickly, after an Army has been beaten and put to flight, ever fresh masses of men are again got together and armed, which in their turn fight well.’ Perhaps the most realistic fear of the Crown Prince was of a French flying column slashing the besieging army’s tenuous link with its rear. It was a fear by no means limited to him alone: ‘What would happen’, speculated Dr. Busch anxiously as late as mid-December, after Faidherbe had pointed the way by cutting (temporarily) the railway from Reims to Amiens, if the French with 300,000 men from the south-east were fall on the thin line of our communications with Germany? We might then easily be compelled even to give up Paris.’ To a military historian it does seem astonishing that Gambetta did not think of such an operation until so late in the war—far too late, as will be seen shortly.

  It was not only the French defenders who suffered from the phenomenal cold that struck in December. Even from the comparative luxury of Bismarck’s quarters, Dr. Busch wrote ‘in spite of the big beech logs which were burning in my fireplace, I could not get reasonably warm in my
room…’ and a fortnight later Russell was complaining that he was ‘shrivelled up with cold’. How much worse it was for the men in the line can be imagined. The funeral ceremonies at Versailles became increasingly frequent, noted Russell, as more and more of the German wounded succumbed. By January, the sick list had reached thirty to forty men per company, and sometimes higher. With the fall in health, morale showed an alarming decline too. General von Stosch had reflected the expectations of every German private when he wrote home on November 23rd: ‘I think that we shall be home by Christmas.’ But, like MacArthur in Korea, he was to be sadly disappointed. A bitter Christmas came and went, with the troops still entrenched round Paris and the end of the war no nearer in sight. Daily the official communiqués repeated a formula that would become extremely familiar to Germans in 1914–18: ‘Nothing new before Paris.’ Photographs of sweethearts and next of kin were getting grubby and well-thumbed. Among his Saxons, Forbes noticed drunkenness sharply increasing.

  The protraction of the war was noticeably affecting the leaders too. By November, the King was tormented with recurrent nightmares provoked by anxieties lest the retreat from Orléans might turn into a rout; Blumenthal was suffering badly from some nervous malady, and Bismarck’s health was not improving. As Russell explained in a letter to Lord Carnarvon on January 7th, Bismarck was ‘laid up and had varicose veins united with indiscriminate appetite—beer and champagne—great eating—no exercise—and mental labour.’ To Russell on New Year’s Eve, the Crown Prince ‘expressed the utmost weariness of the war, because it was a useless expenditure of blood and prolonging of misery and suffering to all….’ Even Bismarck was prone to depression. He confided to his wife: ‘The men are freezing and falling sick; the war is dragging out; the neutrals are interfering in our affairs… and France is arming.’ Time no longer seemed to be on the Prussian side. The Crown Prince predicted sombrely: