Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  This had always been sheer fantasy: enthusiasm, rifles and red flags do not transform an eager crowd into soldiers capable of coordinated action and endurance under fire. The National Guards, hardly engaged during the Prussian siege, were quite ignorant of real war, yet were unaware of their ignorance.20 To take only the most mundane practical example: the majority of the National Guard had been armed not with the bolt-action Chassepot, which was in short supply, but with previously muzzle-loading percussion-lock rifles converted to breech-loaders by the so-called tabatière (‘snuffbox’) modification. The tabatière ‘threw high’; to hit a man in the body at 150 yards you had to aim at his knees, and at his feet when the range closed to 100 yards. This went against all natural instinct, and in 1871 many of the virtually untrained National Guardsmen must have wasted their bullets in the air above their adversaries’ heads.21

  On 3 April 1871, the confidence of the amateur generals that the ‘royalist’ soldiers of Versailles would not stand and fight proved to be mistaken. Advancing without reconnaissance against troops holding old Prussian positions, the Federals – some of them unprovided with ammunition, and some drunk – were badly shaken by shells from Mont Valérien. A minority fled at once, most others were later dispersed by the hard-charging General Gallifet’s cavalry, and the last surrendered at Châtillon the next morning. The captured leaders, and any suspected of being Army deserters, were shot at once (some of them, again, by the bloodthirsty Colonel Boulanger), thus establishing a trade in mutual reprisals that would escalate over the next eight weeks.22 The city gates were shut and rail traffic was halted, but tens of thousands of citizens continued to flee Paris – especially after the Commune passed their ominous Law of Hostages on 5 April.

  AFTER THE FAILURE of the 3 April sorties, the Central Committee of the Federation appointed as operational commander one Gustave Cluseret, who at least had wide (if dubious) military experience. A former officer cashiered for theft, Cluseret had fought in the Crimea before embarking on murky overseas adventures, and he was at least enough of a soldier to recognize that its internal anarchy was crippling the National Guard. There was simply no functioning chain of command; untrained unit commanders were sent conflicting instructions by various organs of the Commune, and district mayors often refused orders for the deployment of their battalions elsewhere in the city. Indiscipline and absenteeism were endemic, and members of some fancifully titled local gangs spent most of their time getting drunk, unchecked by their imitation officers. Too many of the latter saw command not as a serious function but as a political reward, entitling bully-boys to strut around festooned with sashes and pistols like banditti. Cluseret made an attempt to separate men with some potential from those best ignored, but he would claim that he never had more than 30,000 of the former. He appointed as his chief-of-staff the only serving regular Army officer who had joined the Commune, a young lieutenant-colonel of sappers named Louis Rossel. Cluseret’s operations officer was also reliable: Jaroslaw Dombrowski, a Russian-trained veteran of the 1863 Polish insurrection, who was sent to command at Neuilly in the west.

  Thiers, a politician for forty years, could judge the mood of crowds; he recognized that even though the Army of Versailles was improving by inches it was still a tool that would break in his hand if he swung it hard. The troops must be committed gradually, with manageable objectives; they must be rested often, cared for and rewarded, and above all they must never be exposed to the risk of heavy casualties. Nobody understood the strength of the Paris defences better than Thiers – it had been he who supervised their construction in the 1840s, when he was King Louis-Philippe’s prime minister. He knew that there was one weak point: at the Point du Jour, where the Seine emerged through the far south-west corner of the ramparts. He never imagined that his infantry could actually storm fortifications; his method would be to besiege the western half of the city, strip it of its outer forts (particularly Fort Issy, commanding the Point du Jour), ratchet up the pressure, and wait for some opportunity to arise. The Prussian-held eastern perimeter was porous; plain-clothes agents slipped in and out at will, and there was always a chance that some Communard faction might be persuaded to enter secret talks.

  In the meantime, the first troops were sent forward: to the south, to begin the reduction of Fort Issy, General Cissey’s II Corps; and to the west, to bite their way into the Neuilly defences lying outside the ramparts, Ladmirault’s I Corps, which included Montaudon’s division – one of whose units was the Régiment Étrangère.23

  ON 7 APRIL THE FOREIGN REGIMENT marched through Courbevoie towards the Neuilly bridge, to the thunder of nearby government artillery duelling with Federal batteries at Porte Maillot (see Map 1). Rested, well-fed, and with pay in their pockets to spend in any convenient cafécabarets , they were brigaded under General Dumont alongside the Breton 39th Marching Regiment and the 30th Light Infantry Battalion.24 The bridge was blocked off by a Federal barricade; the RE were held in reserve, sheltering behind houses and listening to the crashes of preparatory shellfire and the unmistakable ‘coffee-grinder’ stuttering of hand-cranked mitrailleuses softening up the objective. In the middle of the afternoon the 39th charged, and by nightfall the barricade had been turned into a forward battery for Versailles artillery. Next morning, Dumont’s brigade was relieved and marched back to its camp; this modest baptism of fire had cost the Legion three killed and five wounded.25

  After a week’s rest, the Foreign Regiment were back in Courbevoie; late on 15 April, the senior officers crossed the Seine by boat to reconnoitre positions on the north side of the Avenue Neuilly.26 Anchored on a central gun battery, their sector comprised island-blocks of houses and gardens, linked by a trench across the avenue and by side-street barricades. That night, the companies slipped across the bridge in succession under intermittent blind shelling; dawn, and increasing artillery and rifle fire, revealed their positions as less than solid. The pleasant, leafy streets of bourgeois Neuilly were killing-grounds swept by crossfire. The most exposed positions were those held by V/RE on the left flank, between Rue Peyronnet and Boulevard d’Argenson; here the defenders had to abandon one corner of their ‘frame’ when a shelled house collapsed, and they improvised barricades inside the gutted villas from rubble, furniture, pianos and mattresses. However, although the National Guardsmen were fighting very much better than they had in the open fields, they still hesitated to assault. After one half-hearted attempt on the afternoon of 16 April was driven back, Communard officers and their men could be heard shouting curses at one another. This was not a question of ‘cowardice’; the psychology of an infantry combat is more rational than that.

  Effectiveness in battle depends upon both training, which gives a man a familiar rhythm to follow when he is scared and confused, and – very largely – upon encouraging leadership, by soldiers who at least give the appearance of being calm, knowledgeable and confident. Most National Guardsmen sorely lacked both of these supports, and without them it was hard to be ‘brave’ if confronted by what a flat-nosed ounce of soft lead could do when it struck human flesh and bone at about 900 miles per hour. In defence of houses and trenches, groups of friends had the comfort of each other’s close presence and could choose when to show themselves briefly to take a shot. But making an assault meant coming out of cover, and even moderate marksmen with Army Chassepots could lay down a dangerous curtain of fire over the first 200 or 300 yards of the closing distance before a man armed with a ‘snuffbox’ rifle had any hope of replying effectively. Captain Léonce Patry, who had commanded both regular lignards and National Defence conscripts, wrote that the latter had mostly fought just as well as regulars with two to six years’ service behind them; but also thatNothing is so hard as to lead forward under enemy fire men whose nerves are on edge after being stationary for a long time and who have thereby unlearned the exercise of their will . . . the men, once in skirmish order and well ensconced behind some shelter, in the end do not go forward unless they really want to . . . Hence it is very
difficult for company officers to carry along all their troops, and extraordinary and incessant efforts are required to push them forward and lead them right up to their objective. Those who have not fought in a war as infantry subalterns can have no idea of the forcefulness required . . . to get the men in hand . . . and to make them advance against the enemy.27

  THE FOREIGN REGIMENT’S 2ND BATTALION came up to take their turn in the exposed sector, at one point (oddly) choosing to reinforce a barricade by dragging heavy glass carboys in panniers across from an abandoned factory; these proved to contain perfumed toilet-water, and the sweaty, dust-caked légionnaires splashed themselves liberally. On the left flank a Federal shell plunged into an occupied house, killing Captain Giraud and a corporal, mortally wounding Sub-lieutenant Maumias and injuring three privates. Although firing artillery on more or less fixed lines from the Porte Maillot a mile away hardly demanded much expertise, the Federal artillery in fact had some skilled gunners and plenty of ammunition.28 On the night of 19 April the légionnaires were relieved and withdrew across the Seine. Their four days and nights in the front line had cost them a casualty rate of about 12 per cent – 3 officers and 15 rankers killed and 111 wounded. Decorations were awarded, and on 20 April, while camped in the Parc de Villeneuve-l’Étaing, the légionnaires received reinforcements of 6 officers and 370 bewildered young conscripts from the 20th and 52nd Marching, bringing each battalion up to about 430 all ranks. In the light of recent experience the regiment was ordered to form a specialist sapper platoon.

  On 27 April, the légionnaires of I/RE and V/RE crossed the river again; this time the 1st Battalion took the left sector, and – unusually – came under heavy infantry attack at once. By now Neuilly looked like a miniature Stalingrad avant la lettre. The British eyewitness Colonel Stanley described every tree cut to pieces and the ground covered with spent canister-shot, broken-up dud shells and flattened bullets; guns were emplaced behind improvised breastworks in once lovely gardens, whose railed walls were broken down to provide access. Disembowelled houses revealed upper floors wobbling from one remaining wall, the smashed wreckage of everything from billiard-tables to mirrors, and the enemy dead left lying for days in the spring heat.29 However, the légionnaires’ morale was reportedly good; by now most of them knew every trench corner and blind window, food came up regularly, and ‘trench days’ earned extra wine and rum rations.

  After a few days they were pulled out again, and it was not until the end of the first week in May that they were back in the line at Neuilly. This time they were on the southern perimeter, between Avenue de Neuilly and the Bois de Boulogne. Life was safer here than in the shattered streets north-east of the bridge; there were a few casualties during patrol clashes, but the most memorable event was an encounter between a small Legion outpost and a terrifying figure that turned out to be an orang-utang escaped from the zoo, pursued by its agitated keeper shouting ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’.30 On 11 May, a rebel attack hit the légionnaires’ right flank from the Bois, but was driven back; reserves came up to block any repetition, and thereafter shellfire was the only threat. The soldiers soon figured out the pattern of firing, timing their chores in the open to coincide with the Federals’ habitual mealtimes before getting back behind shell-proof cover. On 14 May they were withdrawn again, and sent out to police quiet sectors in the villages of Gennevilliers, Asnières and Bécon and the suburb of Clichy. The spring heat was building, and inside the city the defence was crumbling.

  IN LESS THAN FIVE WEEKS the Commune’s leaders (‘leadership’ implies too much solidarity) had fatally undermined the efforts of two nominal military commanders. After a scare at Fort Issy, Cluseret was arrested on 30 April as a ‘royalist traitor’ – the usual hysterical currency of the Commune; he was replaced by Louis Rossel, who would be hamstrung by the same conspiratorial disunity as his predecessor. He was frustrated in his attempts to organize new inner barricades and redoubts, and to concentrate the hundreds of neglected cannon to some serious purpose. He ordered the formation of infantry ‘battle groups’, each with its own guns, from among those Guardsmen who seemed willing to fight – now perhaps 20,000, from a theoretical strength of five times that many. The response was disappointing; as always, most men refused to serve outside their own home districts.31 A long struggle over the control of operations led, on 3 May, to the creation of an all-powerful Committee of Public Safety dominated by extremists, but the factional wrangling continued. Most of Rossel’s orders were either ignored or countermanded; when his plan for a counter-attack to ease the pressure on Fort Issy on 7 May was rejected he resigned, was threatened with arrest, and went into hiding.

  On 8 May, after a final crushing bombardment, the surviving defenders finally abandoned the shell-ploughed mound of Fort Issy, thus freeing the approaches to the Point du Jour. The visibly dying old Charles Delescluze was now co-opted to head the Committee of Public Safety, but his military instructions extended no further than an appeal to the gods of 1793. MacMahon’s shelling was relentless, and his counter-batteries had smashed many Federal guns; the National Guard were conscripting civilians at gunpoint; untreated wounded lay in rows along the kerbs, while companies without orders wandered aimlessly. The Prussians had blockaded the eastern gates to prevent food coming in, and some 300,000 Parisians had fled the city. Meanwhile, Communard leaders argued passionately over future social legislation, and State Prosecutor Rigault began to drag batches of his 3,000 hostages in front of summary tribunals. 32

  Seen from outside the ramparts, however, the recapture of Paris still threatened to be difficult and costly. Attacking through city streets is a meat-grinder of infantry: every move from cover to cover invites fire from concealed defenders, and units can quickly become dispersed and lost in the maze, overlooked by cliffs of deadly windows. The broad, straight central boulevards of Hausmann’s redeveloped city centre were shooting-galleries for artillery. If the side streets had been intelligently blocked, then working around the flanks of Communard positions would be a slow and bloody business, and the Paris mob had a proud Revolutionary history of building formidable barricades. In 1871 the traditional type – basically walls of carts, cabs and horse-buses in-filled with prised-up paving blocks, sandbags and furniture – could hold back infantry, though not artillery for long. However, others were real fortifications straight out of a field engineering manual: massive squared-off stacks of paving blocks and sandbags, at least twice a man’s height, tens of yards thick, and incorporating textbook emplacements for cannon and mitrailleuses.

  WHAT LATER BECAME INFAMOUS AS ‘BLOODY WEEK’ began almost as farce. On the afternoon of Sunday 21 May, sheer carelessness in the Federal manning of the Point du Jour ramparts allowed the returned ex-prisoners of war of Douay’s IV Corps to simply scramble inside without a shot being fired. A mishandled counter-attack was beaten back, and the Versaillais got beyond the only viable inner barrier along the Ceinture railway line. Rampart bastions were cleared and other gates opened for troops and cannon; early the next day, Clinchant’s V Corps regulars worked their way clockwise up the inside of the ramparts on Douay’s left, reaching the Étoile at the top of the shell-battered Champs-Élysées; meanwhile, in the south, Cissey’s motley II Corps got in through the Porte de Versailles and headed north. Some 50,000 men were now inside the walls; the piecemeal Federal defence of western Paris collapsed, and by nightfall on Monday 22nd, MacMahon, from his headquarters with the artillery on the dominating hill of the Trocadéro, could plan an articulated advance eastwards on both banks of the Seine.

  Although firing went on throughout the long May days from first light to full darkness, no needless risks were being taken with the soldiers’ lives; determined to avoid chilling his army’s lukewarm morale with heavy casualties, the marshal had strictly forbidden frontal attacks on barricades, and advances were made in unhurried bounds with generous covering fire.33 MacMahon’s pantalons rouges observed the tactical rules that still govern urban fighting to this day, and kept out
of the fire-swept streets whenever possible. Artillery was plentiful enough to provide each brigade with at least a section of two guns to support the advance of its assault battalions. The cannon were set up at corners, to sweep both main streets and cross-streets; meanwhile, the infantry tried to outflank each obstacle by finding a way down a parallel street, crossways through alleys and yards, or into and along the continuous rows of houses from the inside. The slow pace of the Versaillais advance gave the Federals time to build about 500 new barricades during the week 21 – 28 May, but although many would be defended bravely, they were thrown up without coordination, and usually lacked interlocking fields of fire at the vague junctions of district battalion sectors.

  The famous Federal artillery on the hill of Montmartre – the catalyst for the whole confrontation – remained neglected and more or less silent through lack of preparedness and of orders, and the hilltop village was attacked on the morning of Tuesday 23 May from three sides. Resistance (by both male and female units) was bitter in places, but it was piecemeal, and by 1pm the hill was in government hands.34 However, that Tuesday saw a much stiffer Federal defence of the central city, on both banks of the river. Fighting was particularly intense against IV Corps on the Right Bank, on a front of Place de la Concorde – Madeleine – Opéra, and behind this on the Rue de Rivoli.