The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (33 page)

The fat was in the fire. At the end of December, Bismarck, having read Labouchere’s comment, wrote to Washburne complaining that he had abused the American mail privileges. Washburne replied with cold dignity that the U.S. Legation ‘had endeavoured honorably to discharge our duties as neutrals; that we had acted according to the best
of our judgments under this sense of duty; that we proposed to continue to act as we had done; and that if the German authorities could not trust us, they had better stop the bag altogether….’ He concluded with a pointed reminder of what he had done to look after Bismarck’s precariously placed compatriots in Paris. In due course Bismarck apologized; but Washburne had meanwhile instructed his opposite number in London to cease sending
The Times
, so as to avoid any further such accusations from the besieging camp. Labouchere now grumbled (with little enough reason) that, since his ticking-off by Bismarck, Washburne mounted a ‘grim guard’ over his reading matter, and Washburne himself noted being ‘daily violently assailed’ by a portion of the Paris Press as a “Prussian representative” and a “Prussian sympathizer” because of his secretiveness. In fact, thus deprived of his English newspapers, he was to end the Siege little better informed on external events than the average Parisian.

* * *

Apart from this one source of friction, in Parisian eyes the American image remained indisputably more popular than that of the British; for which there were several contributory reasons. First the distant and introversive United States of 1870 were never
expected
to take a position on European affairs; so there was no sense of disappointment here. Secondly, with the American residents in Paris so outnumbered by the British, they were less likely to aggravate sensibilities with their presence, or expose themselves to the charges of ‘useless mouths’. Thirdly, there was the very solid and impressive presence of Washburne himself. But perhaps above all the popularity of the Americans stemmed from the demonstrative usefulness of the American Ambulance during the Siege.

When it was all over, even Ducrot himself was forced to admit the grave shortcomings of the French medical organization. After Sedan, there had been only 6,000 hospital beds available in Paris, which was ‘far from being sufficient’. By the beginning of the Siege this had been raised to 13,000, and eventually to 37,000. The various religious bodies had formed ‘ambulances’ on their premises, as had the railway companies on the sites of their disused stations. Inside the Théâtre français, a nostalgic Gautier found ‘wounded lying about in the foyer, where once the critics used to pace about’. Schools and courtrooms had also been turned into hospitals, and the biggest occupied the floors beneath Labouchere in the Grand Hôtel; while the
Société de la Presse
itself operated a highly active ambulance.

On the surface the results seemed imposing; but only on the surface. In September the Government had ordained two kinds of ‘ambulance’; the first category comprised of properly constituted hospitals capable of receiving the most severely wounded; and the second, ‘
ambulances privées
’ which could only partially fulfil requirements and were allowed to take in the lightly wounded. The latter formed a particular source of abuse. The authorities had little or no control over them; Ducrot claimed that when his soldiers got into them they could no longer be located—‘their stay prolonged itself indefinitely, and they never reappeared in their units’. The ‘private ambulances’ provided an attractive source of occupation for the
grandes dames
of Paris; ‘The wounded soldier has become an object of fashion’, recorded Goncourt. They also offered refuges for able-bodied men dodging active service; until the police were ordered to arrest anyone wearing a Red Cross who was unable to produce his certificate as an
infirmier
. With some relish Labouchere watched a petit crevé
¹
‘arrayed in a suit of velvet knickerbockers, with a red cross on his arm borne off to prison, notwithstanding his whining protests’.

Rivalry for patients among the ‘private ambulances’ was acute; Goncourt relates of one rich man who had converted his house into a hospital, then, distressed to find he had no inmates, paid a local hospital 3,000 francs for a casualty! At the beginning of the siege, Louis Péguret of the National Guard wrote his mother that ‘Madame Massieux [a liquor-vendor] has urged me to have myself brought to her if I am wounded; she has transformed her
boutique
into an ambulance, and she has assured me that I shall lack nothing. I accepted her offer with great pleasure, hoping that Providence will do me the favour of giving my place to some other unfortunate.’ Everywhere Red Cross flags were to be seen flying from private domiciles; from his window in the Grand Hôtel alone, Labouchere could count fifteen. There were, criticized O’Shea, ‘too many toy ambulances in Paris, and too few serious ones’.

The proliferation of ambulances of various kinds led to bitter internecine squabbles (‘There never existed in this world such unhappy families as these humane societies are now in Paris’, claimed Tommy Bowles at the beginning of January); which in turn led, on the battlefield, to appalling chaos. According to Ducrot, their arrival on the scene frequently ‘paralyzed’ the work of the divisional and corps ambulances. Among several similar blunders, a British voluntary ambulance worker, Felix Whitehurst, records how on one occasion
the
Ambulance de la Presse
received orders to send two hundred waggons to collect wounded at St.-Denis:

Rather astonished, they got together as many conveyances as they could, and went off to the last resting-place of French kings. When they got there they found that wrong directions had been given; the wounded had been carried into Paris by the
Intendance Militaire
, and instead of two hundred carriages being required, it was intended to say there were about two hundred wounded.

But worst of all was the picture in the base hospitals in Paris. There were insufficient doctors, nurses were untrained,
¹
methods primitive and conditions appallingly unhygenic. Juliette Lambert noted being deeply disturbed by the terrible cries of the wounded having limbs amputated in the Palais de l’Industrie, and later in the Siege she was shocked to see ‘one of our great surgeons weep in telling me that, in his hospital, he had not saved a single amputation case’. The deadly killer was septicaemia, often complicated by gangrene, for which—in their practical application—Lister’s principles of antisepsis had not yet produced a remedy. Most hospitals had a ‘death shed’ into which any man that contracted septicaemia was immediately removed; ‘The simple reason’, explained an American surgeon, ‘was that their presence under the same roof with their comrades would mean certain death for all.’ The situation in the Grand Hôtel, the biggest ‘ambulance’ in Paris, which housed five hundred wounded moved there from the Palais de l’Industrie, was particularly atrocious; even though, according to Labouchere, the size of its staff outnumbered the patients. It was reputed that a man could not cut his finger in the germ-ridden atmosphere of the Grand Hôtel and reach the door alive. When Bowles visited it, he found the wounded

packed three, four, and five in each of the little rooms which the company was wont to let to single travellers at high prices. Ventilation cannot be said to be imperfect, for there is none; and the dead, as many as fifty at a time, are placed, ‘packed like biscuits’, in the centre of a gallery into which the rooms open. The stench is something terrible, and only last night a French gentleman said to me, ‘To be taken there is death’.

All in all, the state of the Parisian ‘ambulances’ showed little advance over what Lord Raglan’s men had suffered in the Crimea. And the nearest resemblance to any Florence Nightingale upon the scene lay in the presence of the American Ambulance, which owed
its existence to Dr. Thomas Evans, the handsome and enterprising dentist who had assisted the Empress Eugénie to flee from Paris. After the Great Exhibition of 1867, Evans had (for no very clear reason) bought up the whole collection of up-to-date medical equipment of the American Civil War exhibited in Paris, and when war broke out he had organized an ambulance and presented all this equipment to it, plus 10,000 francs. In charge of the American Ambulance was Dr. Swinburne, as Chief Surgeon, who based his work on Civil War experiences. There it had been proved that the most effective way of combating septicaemia was by ensuring perfect ventilation. To the astonishment of the French with their native horror of
courants d’air
, the American Ambulance housed its two hundred wounded in draughty tents, kept warm only by a stove placed in a hole in the ground which dried and heated the earth beneath the tent. The results were miraculous: whereas four out of every five died in the purulent confines of the Grand Hôtel, four out of five of Swinburne’s amputation cases survived.

The British correspondents were constantly singing Swinburne’s praises, and even Dr. Alan Herbert, working in Wallace’s British Ambulance, had to admit that its American counterpart was ‘one of the shows of today’. On any battlefield the American Ambulance was always (according to Tommy Bowles) the first to arrive; at the Great Sortie it brought in eighty wounded men, one of them dying in the arms of Washburne’s son; and at a later engagement its field clearing-station was actually hit by Prussian shells. Its fame spread fast; Labouchere said, ‘It is the dream of every French soldier, if he is wounded, to be taken to this ambulance.
¹
They appear to be under the impression that, even if their legs are shot off, the skill of the Aesculapii of the United States will make them grow again’. It may have been a mild exaggeration, but certainly there was no mistaking the efficacy of Evans’s and Swinburne’s team; nor the Parisian gratitude which their work of mercy gained for the United States.

Death of Castor and Pollux

12. Hunger

O
NCE
the bitter disappointment at Ducrot’s failure in the Great Sortie had passed, purely military considerations no longer predominated in Parisian minds. There was now a topic that had become far more grimly immediate. On December 8th, Goncourt noted in his journal: ‘People are talking only of what they eat, what they can eat, and what there is to eat. Conversation consists of this, and nothing more…. Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon.’ Among his circle, Goncourt found Théophile Gautier lamenting ‘that he has to wear braces for the first time, his abdomen no longer supporting his trousers’. Goncourt himself was finding the salted meat distributed by the Government ‘inedible’, and described how he had to kill one of his own chickens. The execution had been carried out ineptly, ‘with a Japanese sabre. It was terrible, the bird escaped from me and fluttered about the garden, without a head’. Minister Washburne, better off than many a Parisian, confided ‘I sigh for the doughnuts and hot rolls at Proctors’, and another American recalled with apparent envy how, at a concert in November, a young lady ‘received, instead of a bouquet, a—piece of cheese’.
Cheese, along with butter and milk, was now little more than a memory of the past, and the vast herds of cattle and sheep that in September had filled the Bois, as well as every vacant plot in Paris, had vanished. Fresh vegetables had run out; for one franc a day and at considerable risk to themselves, ‘marauders’ were sent out under the protection of
Mobiles
to grub about in ‘no-man’s-land’. Augustus O’Shea recalled recognizing one of them, a coloured Martiniquais, who only two months earlier had sold him a pair of gloves in a smart shop of the Rue de la Paix, and whom he now encountered seedily dressed and ‘staggering under a bag-net of cauliflowers’. Before the Siege began, Bismarck had predicted in his cynical fashion that ‘eight days without
café au lait
’ would suffice to break the Parisian bourgeoisie, and even the Government of National Defence had not seriously reckoned on a blockade lasting more than two months, at most. Now, with Christmas, the hundredth day was already approaching.

Early in October Paris had begun to eat horsemeat, first introduced by Parisian butchers four years perviously as a cheap provender for the poor.
Pour encourager les autres
, to create a wider fashion for hippophagy, the
Commission Centrale d’Hygiéne et de Salubrité
, had treated itself to a sumptuous and well-advertised banquet, the menu of which read:

Consommé de cheval

Cheval bouilli aux choux

Culotte de cheval à la mode

Côte de cheval braisée