The Fall of Paris

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The Fall of Paris Page 29

by Alistair Horne


  The longer this struggle lasts, the better for the enemy and the worse for us. The public opinion of Europe has not remained unaffected by the spectacle. We are no longer looked upon as the innocent sufferers of wrong, but rather as the arrogant victors, no longer content with the conquest of the foe, but fain to bring about his utter ruin. No more do the French appear in the eyes of neutrals as a mendacious, contemptible nation, but as the heroic-hearted people that against overwhelming odds is defending its dearest possessions in honourable fight…. Bismarck has made us great and powerful, but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and—our conscience.

  Clearly something had to be done to hasten the end of the war, and there now seemed only one way left to achieve this. Bombard Paris into submission! It was a measure which public opinion at home now demanded with mounting impatience. When the Siege began, three courses had presented themselves to the Prussians: to take the city by frontal assault; to starve it out, like Metz; or to pound it with the mighty cannons of Krupp until, like Strasbourg, the civilian population cried for an end. Because of the effectiveness of the permanent fortifications of Paris, and the enormous casualties they could wreak upon an attacking infantry, the first course had never been seriously considered. On October 8th, the Crown Prince had written ‘I count definitely on starving out the city’, and it was a view shared at that time by all factions of Prussian leadership. Two weeks later, after Paris had already given the Prussians their first surprise by their determination to resist, von Blumenthal delivered a detailed appreciation:

  I do not think that we can hope for the bombardment of Forts Issy, Vanves, and Montrouge before the 10th of November…. The forts will then have to be bombarded for at least four or five days, sapping pushed on, and batteries established in the second position. The two forts, Issy and Vanves, can then be assaulted by storm on the 1st of December. The real difficulties of the situation will then only begin; namely the attack on the enceinte. If we do succeed in capturing the enceinte by storm, it could not be before the 1st of January—a result which the mere investment of the fortress should bring about of itself by that date. It is impossible that Paris can be provisioned for so long. I am of the opinion that we ought not to think of a bombardment, but trust entirely to starvation.

  Von Blumenthal had submitted his appreciation to Moltke, who ‘agreed with me entirely’ Upon this optimistic and erroneous supposition, Moltke based his strategy, and no priority was attached to preparing a siege train of heavy guns round Paris. His artillery commander, General von Hindersin, had been left behind in Sedan to organize transportation back to Germany of the ‘booty’.

  When he did arrive, in the way that military men have of pressing their own wares, von Hindersin immediately began canvassing for an early bombardment of Paris. His case soon gained, for political reasons, the support of Bismarck, followed by that of the King. But no issue was to divide the Prussian leaders with greater acrimony. On the other side, the anti-bombarders comprised the Crown Prince—for humanitarian reasons—and Moltke and most of the generals, with the exception of von Roon whom Bismarck had won over. Moltke’s attitude was purely based on military considerations. Bismarck, in whom a layman’s light-hearted regard for the problems of the military combined with rooted cynicism about French character, gaily reckoned that ‘two or three shells’ would suffice to scare Paris into capitulation, but Moltke—observing the minimal effect that French cannonades obtained upon his own positions—opposed any bombardment until at least 250 heavy guns could be assembled with an initial supply of 500 rounds each. And this effort, declared Moltke, must represent ‘a lead weight tied to the legs of the Army’. There were mountainous logistic difficulties. All four of Moltke’s Armies in France were supplied from a primitive railway network which converged at one bottleneck, Frouard on the Moselle, before linking with a single line to Germany. Only one line fed the forces of investment; even this was unviable until the fortress of Toul fell on September 25th, and daily it was jammed with the immense everyday requirements of a besieging army. Moreover, until Strasbourg and Metz were reduced by the end of October, the 250 heavy guns required for Paris were simply not available.

  As October passed and the French showed no signs of surrender, Moltke—as a prudent commander, although maintaining his reservation —realized he would have to provide for an eventual bombardment. Valuable time had already been lost, and it was obvious that further long delays could not be avoided. Even when the railway had been cleared as far as Nanteuil-sur-Marne, von Blumenthal noted that the Crown Prince’s Army (to whom the burden of the bombardment would principally fall) had fifty-six miles to haul its ammunition, while ‘we have only 600 carts in the siege park, and require at least 1,700’. Roads were so bad that it took the heavily laden waggons as long as nine days to make the return trip between Nanteuil and the siege park set up at Villacoublay, and many collapsed under their loads. With the freeze-up, fresh tribulations arrived. There was also the problem of the range of Herr Krupp’s super-heavy guns, which, with a maximum of 5,600 metres, would reach no farther than the suburbs of Paris, unless the forts to the south of Paris were first silenced and then the guns moved forward again.

  On November 20th, Bismarck was relaying vexedly the latest discussion about the bombardment to the sympathetic ears of Dr. Busch; ‘I said to the King once more, so late as yesterday, that it was now full time for it, and he had nothing to say against me. He told me that he had ordered it, but the generals said they were not ready.’ Blumenthal’s account of the same meeting describes him as going so far as to declare to Bismarck ‘that I would rather retire than permit it’. Blumenthal’s nervous twitch was getting markedly worse, and so was Bismarck’s indisposition. On the 28th, the latter grumbled to Busch: ‘If they would give me the command-in-chief for four-and-twenty hours… I should give just one order-“fire!”… If we had only begun the bombardment four weeks ago, we should in all probability have been by this time in Paris….’ As it was, the eager artillerist, General von Hindersin, had himself been forced to tell Bismarck only a few days previously that the bombardment could, in any case, not begin on January 1st. But meanwhile pressure at home was beginning to make itself felt more and more at Versailles. ‘Make haste and bombard Paris, and have done with it’, O’Shea read in one letter found upon a dead German, and it typified the attitudes of countless German wives and sweethearts. The Press, undoubtedly pepped up by the conniving Bismarck, was now roaring for the final act, and a little jingle made the rounds:

  Bester Moltke, sei nicht dumm,

  Mach doch endlich: Bumm! Bumm! Bumm!

  Then, by the second week in December, things had reached such a pitch that a cable arrived from the Governor of Berlin expressing fears of insurrections. With gleeful Schadenfreude, Bismarck from his sickbed had the message passed on to the King.

  There was an important Council of War on December 17th. Although Bismarck was excluded from it, Moltke had been swung round. The Crown Prince, though now in the minority, still staunchly resisted Bismarck and the generals. His was the sole voice to be raised pleading on humanitarian grounds within the German camp at that time, and well may one speculate how much happier the fate of twentieth-century Europe might have been, had not an untimely death1 wrenched this well-intentioned kindly figure from the German throne, leaving it instead to his son, young Wilhelm II. Even the policy of starving Paris into submission had disturbed him, and in his diaries he reveals himself to have been constantly worrying about the fate of the children in the city. As the threat of the bombardment drew closer, Russell wrote in a letter to Lord Carnarvon how the Crown Prince had confided to him: ‘I pass sleepless hours when I think of the women and children’; and as the guns actually blazed out he was to be tortured by the recent discovery ‘that at Strasbourg, as a result of the siege, a hospital for children who have lost limbs has had to be established’. But on December 17th the victory was once again Bismarck’s. It was agreed that first of all there sh
ould be an experimental bombardment of Mont Avron, an isolated plateau beyond the line of forts to the east of Paris where the French had established themselves in support of the Great Sortie. If that succeeded, the southern forts would be subjected to an all-out pounding, following which the city itself would become the target. It would begin just as soon as the guns and their ammunition were ready.

  * * *

  Out beyond Prussian Versailles, in the country still in French hands, Gambetta was persisting in his endeavours to carry on the guerre à outrance; even though deprived of the comfort of knowing just what alarm his activities were still capable of provoking at enemy H.Q. But the month of December brought little comfort of any kind. The defeat at Orléans and the failure of the Great Sortie had marked the watershed in the affairs of Gamebtta’s armies, and since then morale had slumped. In many areas, the war had become a broken-backed guerilla affair conducted by irregular franc-tireurs, in which atrocities led to savage counter-atrocities with the civilian population bearing the brunt of Prussian reprisals. There were more and more cases of Gambetta’s soldiery being refused shelter and support as weariness with the ruinous war grew among the civilians of the provinces. Under the endless miles of dispiriting retreat, the papier-mâché soles of hastily made boots disintegrated, leaving many soldiers barefooted in glacial conditions. They cursed Gambetta when they heard of such optimistic utterances as one telegram sent from Bourges in December: ‘Things are getting better here very fast and a few days from now you will hear news of us. Fine cigars, keep cheerful….’ Corruption was rife among the generals—one was noted for setting up his headquarters in a local brothel—and discipline in many units was non-existent. As the Crown Prince remarked, ‘It is typical of the French how, so long as the struggle lasts, even when they are in the field against their will, they always fight bravely, but directly it is all over they throw to the winds, so to speak, all that is generally expected of soldiers.’ Woes beset Gambetta on every side. Bakunin the anarchist had made an appearance in Lyons, over which for a brief time the Red Flag had flown and a Commune presided; in Marseilles on October 31st, an adventurer called Cluseret who had fought in the American Civil War had carried out a revolt rather more successfully than Flourens in Paris; there were uprisings in various parts of the south, all of which had to be quelled. Finally, the Prussian advance had forced Gambetta to take the humiliating step of evacuating his ‘Government’ from Tours to Bordeaux, thereby creating a precedent to be followed in two successive wars.

  One after another, he had fallen out with his generals after they disappointed him. Aurelle had been sacked and submitted to vituperation in which his conduct was approximated to Bazaine’s, and under such accusations of treachery more than one general preferred to relinquish his command. There was no escaping the fact that by January all Gambetta’s armies in the field which might have relieved Paris had failed. Chanzy, for all the remarkable spirit that he still managed to instil into the Army of the Loire, had been pushed back to Le Mans and largely neutralized. Faidherbe, though performing wonders in the north in Flanders and Artois until he was brought to bay at St.-Quentin, clearly had no hope now of breaking through to join Trochu. It was little wonder that Gambetta was reported to be looking old and depressed. But true to his character he still refused to abandon hope, and there remained to him one trick comprising two rather dog-eared cards.

  While Louis-Napoleon was still on the throne, that great Italian champion of liberal causes and the downtrodden, Giuseppe Garibaldi, had actually contemplated launching his volunteers into an invasion of France. But when the new Republic was proclaimed and France became the underdog, his sympathies performed a rapid turnabout. On October 7th, accompanied by his sons, Ricciotti and Menotti, and collecting several thousand troops as he went, the leonine old warrior landed in Marseilles; his fingers bent with rheumatism, his legs so lame from past wounds that at times he had to be carried in a litter, but he was still indomitable. In Tours, Crémieux greeted the news with ‘My God—we needed only that!’ and the Garibaldians were assigned an unimportant role in the south-east of France, to keep them out of mischief. This Garibaldi quickly turned to good advantage. On November 19th, Ricciotti and 560 men (plus one of the ubiquitous Daily News correspondents) attacked the German garrison at Châtillon on the upper reaches of the Seine (not to be confused with the Châtillon on the southern fringe of Paris), some 120 miles south-east of Paris. The Germans there numbered nearly a thousand, but Ricciotti succeeded in capturing 167 of them as well as much booty, and in killing the colonel in command. Ricciotti then withdrew, with a loss of only three killed and twelve wounded. This brilliant coup de main threw the local German forces into great anxiety, the ripples of which reached Versailles; for Châtillon was but sixty crow’s-flight miles away from the Prussians’ single supply-line to Paris. As the Crown Prince gloomily predicted: ‘Should the Garibaldians succeed in falling on Vitry-le-François or any other point of our railway lines, they would be in a position to cut off for the moment all our communications with the frontier and home.’ A week after Châtillon, less successfully, Garibaldi risked a pitched battle in attempting to retake Dijon, and narrowly escaped disaster at the hands of General von Werder. But Garibaldi’s exploits had belatedly kindled a bright vision in the mind of that amateur strategist, Gambetta.

  In mid-December, but not until mid-December, Gambetta decided to expedite Bourbaki, the last of his generals, with an army one hundred thousand strong, to join up with Garibaldi and raise the Siege of Paris by severing Prussian communications through a right hook aimed at Lorraine. The choice could hardly have been less fortunate; had it been Chanzy or Faidherbe the prospects might have been much better. But Bourbaki the dapper Guardsman, object of that merry jingle of Empire days,1 was still Imperialist at heart, as unenthusiastic about Gambetta and the Republic as he was about continuing the war itself. In turn his civil superiors lacked confidence in him, and indeed he had little confidence left in himself; as he grumbled to one of his young officers who had proposed a night operation, ‘I’m twenty years too old. Generals should be your age.’ Transporting Bourbaki’s army to the south-east proved too great a strain for Freycinet’s railways, and in the arctic weather the troops suffered appallingly. When they reached the Dijon area, ill fed and ill clad, their fighting value was sharply diminished. There was much confusion in liaising with Garibaldi, combined with inept staff-work and an uninspiring example set by Bourbaki; and climatic conditions were such that only a Russian army could have attacked with vigour. Yet, despite all this, under the new threat von Werder was forced temporarily to evacuate the important centre of Dijon, causing once again gravest alarums at Versailles. As late as January 14th, the Crown Prince was offering fervent prayers: ‘We trust to heaven that, in his extraordinarily strong defensive position, he will succeed in holding back General Bourbaki’.

  But it was altogether too late. Secretary Wickham Hoffman of the U.S. Legation in Paris who had served as a colonel under General Grant at the Siege of Vicksburg was one American Civil War veteran who was astounded that ‘no serious effort was ever made to cut the German lines of communication’. He later recalled how General Sheridan, the Unionist Cavalry leader, had exclaimed to him—depite his pro-German sympathies, and using a word reminiscent of the mot de Cambronne—that if he ‘had been outside with thirty thousand cavalry, he would have made the King * * * *’. Sheridan in fact had the lowest opinion of the employment of cavalry by both sides in the Franco-Prussian War, and had Gambetta possessed the services of a Jeb Stuart, or even of Sheridan himself—let alone of a Robert E. Lee—the outcome of the Siege and indeed the whole war might well have been different. Certainly, that a serious initiative against Moltke’s communications was not contemplated much earlier must be rated one of the worst strategical errors of the Tours Government. The Prussian commander dispatched to repair the damage done by Bourbaki, General von Manteuffel, himself admitted that the Garibaldi-Bourbaki campaign might well have been, for the
French, ‘the most fortunate of the war of 1870–71’. As it was, it was to provide the final French catastrophe of that war.

  Prussian shells fall in Montparnasse

  14. Paris Bombarded

  ON the cold morning of December 27th, a French colonel called Heintzler and his wife were giving a breakfast party for several friends at the recently acquired outpost of Avron. Suddenly the party was spoiled by a heavy Prussian shell which burst without warning in the room. Six of the breakfasters were killed outright, the host and hostess were gravely wounded, and only the regimental doctor and a servant emerged unscathed. Two days later Felix Whitehurst recorded seeing the remains of the six victims in his hospital: ‘but it was such a human ruin that no individuality could be recognised’. Ceaselessly during those two days Prussian guns of a calibre hitherto unknown continued to plunge their huge shells down on Avron. A grim new phase of the Siege had opened.

  The Avron plateau was a magnificent natural feature due east of Paris, with commanding views on all sides. But it lay beyond the line of French forts, like an island, isolated from Fort Rosny by a deep and wide ravine. It had been seized by the French to support Ducrot’s Great Sortie, and should logically have been abandoned when the Sortie failed, but it was the kind of textbook position that military men are habitually reluctant to give up. Despite the fact that the artillery was commanded by Colonel Stoffel, the enlightened former Military Attaché in Berlin who had done his best to warn France what to expect of Moltke’s army, little had been done during the four weeks of French tenancy to organize Avron’s defences. Beyond the usual half-heartedness and procrastination, there was the sheer incapacity of undernourished men to dig in the frozen earth. Entrenchments had been prepared to withstand little more than field-artillery fire. As O’Shea remarked, ‘the earth had hardly been stirred’. Forbes, who on the other side of the lines was watching the Saxons vigorously felling trees as they brought up their huge guns, was amazed that the French should remain apparently deaf, and blind, to all the fracas of these preparations. To bombard this one small position, Moltke had brought up seventy-six of his heaviest guns: Krupp steel 24-pounders which in fact threw 56-lb. projectiles, and even bigger Krupp pieces that could fling a shell of 110 lb. Later, an observer told O’Shea in awe how he had seen one crater thrown up at Avron by the Krupp guns measuring four and a half feet across and a yard deep; not much by twentieth-century standards, but a record for those days. The shallow French entrenchments were swiftly shattered; young troops unnerved by this hideous new experience ran screaming to the rear; and one after another Colonel Stoffel’s gun positions were silenced. All day the searing bombardment continued. The next day the German gunners re-sighted their pieces, and the shelling was resumed with even more lethal accuracy. Trochu came out to survey the scene, as did Tommy Bowles, and both displayed their customary courage under fire. But by the 29th the French were left with no alternative but to evacuate the whole plateau.

 

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