The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (10 page)

The contrast remained throughout the war in some rural areas; Weber tells how, in one village, ‘a French patrol saw the people running to greet it with food and gifts, only to turn away when they realised the men were not Prussians.’

Exultation could hardly have been so widespread were it not for supreme confidence. Even Gambetta considered it safe to go off on holiday in Switzerland. Frenchmen still regarded Bismarck’s Germany with the kind of amused contempt that Prussians reserved for Austrians. ‘Gérolstein’ was the model, and who could be frightened by an army under command of a ‘General Boum’? Also, it was encouraging to think that German society was perhaps just as decadent as the Second Empire, if one could judge from accounts (which had delighted Paris) of the German princelings at Baden-Baden who had tripped round the famous Cora Pearl and her girls, chanting

We will give anything, even Germany,

To go and drink champagne tonight

With Madame Cora, tra la la.

Of course, there were those who were less sanguine. Mérimée, writing to his friend Panizzi about the enthusiasm for the war and the high morale of the soldiers, added, however, ‘I am afraid the generals are not geniuses’, and a few days later ‘I am dying of fear’. From Washington, Prévost-Paradol, newly appointed French Ambassador,
warned his countrymen, ‘You will not go to Germany, you will be crushed in France. Believe me, I know the Prussians’. Then he committed suicide. But, just like the warnings Baron Stoffel, the French Military Attaché in Berlin, had been sending the army, Prévost-Paradol’s forebodings also went unheeded. It was more comfortable to place one’s faith in the smug pronouncement of the Military Almanac, which rated the Prussian Army as ‘a magnificent organization, on paper, but a doubtful instrument for the defensive, and which would be highly imperfect during the first phase of an offensive war’.

In fact, whether on paper or in practice, the Prussian Army of 1870 was a magnificent instrument by any standard. At the top, the King was the first professional soldier to rule Prussia since Frederick the Great; it was a matter of pride to him that he could inspect eighty-seven battalions in twenty-two days, and under his mantle nothing had been too good for the army. Although the combined population of Prussia and the Northern Confederation, at thirty million, was less than that of France, a system of universal service and of reserves organized on a regional basis that was far in advance of the era enabled the German states to produce an army of 1,183,000 men within eighteen days of mobilization. Nothing on this scale had ever been seen before. Moltke, possibly a greater organizer than a strategist, had devoted his entire genius to the creation of the General Staff, recruited from the élite of Potsdam. For this great body of troops it provided a brain and nervessuch as no other nation possessed. No single item was left to chance. Railways built in Germany in recent years had been planned with a particular eye to military needs, especially the requirements of mobilization, and a highly trained corps of telegraphists ensured excellent communications. All aimed at a maximum speed of concentration, for an offensive campaign that would hit the enemy hard before he was ready; the technique would be employed again by the Germans in two later European wars. The Army was issued with maps of France showing roads not yet marked on maps of the French Ministry of War, and when later the Prussians constructed a ‘turning’ railway around Metz, it was reported that a survey had been carried out secretly three years previously. With the invading army came a regular system of military government (virtually unheard of before the twentieth century), including such refinements as a Post Office functionary dispatched to check that the accounts of the enemy’s postmasters corresponded to book entries. The Teutonic ‘organization man’ had arrived.

The gay uniforms of the French Army, the joyous fanfares and the dashing officers with their fierce, emulative ‘imperials’ and expansive
confidence made a striking contrast to the Prussians’ sober disdain for any kind of superfluity. In weapons, the French had a distinct advantage in their cartridge-firing
chassepot
rifle with nearly twice the range of the Dreyse ‘needle-gun’. But they had nothing to compare with the steel breech-loading cannon which Herr Krupp had given Prussia, and which the French military leaders had refused to take seriously. The Prussian guns were superior in range, accuracy, and rapidity of fire, and while the French shells tended to burst noisily but harmlessly in the air, the Prussian percussion-fused shells exploded with demoralizing effect at the foot of their targets. Apart from the renowned
chassepot
, the French Army placed its faith in a secret weapon called the
mitrailleuse
. A development of the six-barrelled American Gatling gun, and a primitive precursor of the machine-gun, it consisted of a bundle of twenty-five barrels, which, by turning a handle, could be fired all together or in very rapid succession. In the early days of battle, French newspapers published sketches showing a soldier at his
mitrailleuse
looking in vain, after a few minutes’ cranking, for one remaining target. But the much-vaunted weapon had two grave defects; it was as large, unwieldy, and vulnerable as a cannon, but without the latter’s range; and it had been such a secret weapon that it was not issued to the Army until a matter of days before mobilization.

In leaders, the imposing triumvirate of Bismarck, Moltkc, and Roon would have required an opponent closer to the stature of the first Napoleon than of his nephew. The Prussians had the edge on the French both in that elusive quality, the will to conquer, as well as in actual battle experience; for them, Sadowa had been what Spain and Poland were to be for the Third Reich. France’s generals were second-raters by almost any criterion, and all particularly short on initiative. Bazaine, MacMahon, Canrobert, Bourbaki had been skilful at chasing Algerians in Algeria, Mexicans in Mexico; there had of course been wars against European powers in the Crimea and Italy, but they had been long ago, and the victories at Magenta and Solferino had lulled the Army into that complacency so fatal to victorious nations. Poor Bazaine, who was later to find himself locked up in Metz with 200,000 men, had previously never commanded more than 25,000, and that only in manœuvres. And at the very summit of the Empire the divine spark of leadership was lacking, with Louis-Napoleon now desperately stricken by the stone in his bladder ‘as big as a pigeon’s egg’.

Although in some respects Louis-Napoleon possessed greater military ability than most of his advisers, on matters of life and death he had been tragically impotent to assert his will. Against strong
opposition from the Artillery Committee he had succeeded in pushing through the
chassepot
, but he had been forced to finance the
mitrailleuse
out of his own pocket, and completely defeated in his efforts to modernize the artillery. Thus, despite Marshal Lebœuf’s famous boast about the Army being ready down to the last gaiter-button (which wits claimed was largely true, as there was not a gaiter in store anyway), it went to war with muzzle-loading brass cannon that were, compared with the products of Herr Krupp, about as obsolete as the Emperor’s Roman
ballistœ
. Worst of all, however, parsimonious and complacent politicians had repeatedly frustrated his attempts at reforming Army organization so as to introduce something resembling Prussia’s compulsory service. The feudal system of ‘substitution’—or ‘blood tax’—whereby a rich man could ‘buy’ a less affluent citizen to take his place with the colours still prevailed, and it was as demoralizing as it was inefficient. The Left had vigorously attacked any expansion of arms spending, with Jules Favre questioning what possible interest there could be for Prussia to war with France; although later no faction would be quicker to chastise the regime for its incompetence in prosecuting the war. For the
Garde Mobile
, the territorials that were to provide the answer to the Prussian reservists, Marshal Niel, the Minister of War, had asked for 14 million francs and got 5. Then, typical of Louis-Napoleon’s bad luck, Niel—perhaps the one man who might have reformed the Army—died in 1869. Extremely unpopular in the provinces the
Garde Mobile
was still little more than an idea as France entered the war.
¹

During those first days, France’s highly centralized mobilization machinery produced scenes of indescribable chaos. Soldiers from the Pas de Calais had to rejoin their depots in the south, or in the west, finally to be sent to fight in the east. The whole nation surged with men travelling frenetically to and fro. A retired major watching the commotion at the Gare de l’Est said ‘It was like that during our embarkments for the Crimea and Italy; the memory reassures me’. But the commanders found less cause for comfort. On the third day of mobilization, General Micheler telegraphed in despair: ‘Have arrived at Belfort. Can’t find my brigade. Can’t find the divisional commander. What shall I do? Don’t know where my regiments are’. When travel-weary troops finally reached their destination, there was often nowhere to sleep because the tents could not be found. Magazines were discovered to be empty. Gunners became separated from their guns. In Metz, France’s chief war depot, there were no stores of sugar, coffee, brandy, or rice—and worst of all no salt. At Douai, a gunner general reported ‘finding a fine stock of horse-collars, but one-third of them were too narrow to fit any animal’s neck’. From Brest, the Admiral Commanding complained that he was putting to sea without charts of the Baltic or the North Sea; and in a final display of combined arrogance and incompetence, the only maps issued to the Army were of Germany, not France. They were never to be used. Summing up the horrible improvidence with which France went so gaily to war against the finest army since the
Grande Armée,
Émile Zola wrote of a ‘Germany ready, better commanded, better armed, sublimated by a great charge of patriotism; France frightened, delivered into disorder… having neither the leaders nor the men. nor the necessary arms’.

On July 28th, Louis-Napoleon rode forth in command of his armies with the Empress’s last words—‘Louis, do your duty well’—still
ringing in his ears, but with not a single Army corps at full strength. As he passed through Metz, suffering constant pain, to an eighteen-year-old called Ferdinand Foch he gave the impression ‘of a man utterly worn out’. Moltke had over 400,000 men in supreme fighting trim and 1,440 guns concentrated on the far side of the Rhine, against the less than 250,000 partially organized men that Louis-Napoleon had been able to muster. Nevertheless, goaded on by the bellicose Paris mob and his own beloved Eugénie, once again breaking his principle of ‘
ne rien brusquer
’ he decided on an ‘
attaque brusquée
’, without waiting for his own mobilization to be completed. His strategic plan, in so far as he had one, was to advance rapidly eastwards into Germany, in the hopes of swinging the South German states, and eventually the reluctant Austrians, into the war against Prussia. It was about as realistic as most of his ideas on foreign policy. Capturing Saarbrücken from weak German advance forces on August 2nd, he gained for France her one victory of the campaign (one of those to take part in it was the perplexed General Micheler, who had at last caught up with his troops and his Divisional Commander). All Paris revelled in the triumph, and at the news that the fourteen-year-old Prince Impérial had had his baptism of fire, picking up as a souvenir a Prussian bullet that fell nearby; a telegram was read out on the Bourse, reporting the capture of the Prussian Crown Prince by Marshal MacMahon; and enraptured Parisians made a famous tenor sing the Marseillaise from the top of a horse-drawn bus.

But the rejoicing was short-lived. Rapidly appreciating that the French Army was divided by the line of the Vosges mountains, Moltke deployed his forces so that they could concentrate with overwhelming superiority against either half. The first blow fell at daybreak on the 4th when men of General Abel Douay’s division in MacMahon’s Army were caught breakfasting at Wissembourg in Alsace by troops of the Crown Prince, proving that the latter was still very much at large. The French fought heroically but were overrun by sheer weight of numbers, and became demoralized when their general was killed by a shell. But this was still only a skirmish. The main blow fell two days later at Wœrth when MacMahon, deceived as to the numbers the Prussians could bring against them, allowed himself to be brought to battle by the Crown Prince, with more than twice as many infantry as himself. The Prussians suffered so heavily that they could not pursue, but the result was a resounding French defeat. On the same day, the other half of the French forces, optimistically entitled ‘The Army of the Rhine’ and commanded by the Emperor himself, suffered an equally crushing defeat at Spicheren to the left of the Vosges and close to the scene of the earlier French success at Saarbrucken.
In fact, this battle was not part of Moltke’s itinerary. At that moment he was actually holding back his First and Second Armies, awaiting the success of the Third on his left. But the impetuous General von Steinmetz, drawn by the sound of shooting, precipitated his First Army into the battle.

At Spicheren, if the French had been worth their salt (Bazaine and three divisions were doing nothing nine miles from the battle), the day should have been turned into a Prussian disaster. As it was, Prussian casualties outnumbered the French by 5,000 to 4,000, and at Wœrth both sides lost about 11,000 men. The two French defeats were far from decisive, but the troops’ morale (already upset by the disorder of mobilization, and the undisciplined, drunken scenes accompanying it) had been seriously shaken; chiefly by the Prussian artillery which had torn great holes in the ranks of the infantrymen long before the Prussians came within range of the deadly
chassepot
or the
mitrailleuse
; and by the ineptitude their leaders had displayed.