The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (43 page)

On January 18th the National Guard began its approach march to the west of Paris, ready to attack the world’s most efficient professional army. Goncourt was there watching them:

It was a grandiose, soul-stirring sight, that army marching towards the guns booming in the distance, an army with, in its midst, grey-bearded civilians who were fathers, beardless youngsters who were sons, and in its open ranks women carrying their husband’s or their lover’s rifle slung across their backs. And it is impossible to convey the picturesque touch brought to the war by this citizen multitude escorted by cabs, unpainted omnibuses, and removal vans converted into army provision waggons.

There did indeed seem to be present a flicker of the spirit of the taxicabs speeding to the Marne in 1914, and Juliette Lambert also was struck how the National Guards marched ‘behind the bands, eager to act, and resolved to dare all in this last effort to save our Paris’. (But, although half of the nearly 100,000 men earmarked for the sortie came from the National Guard, once again Edwin Child was disappointed. The 18th, the day after his 23rd birthday, found him at the other side of Paris, ‘playing cards in the afternoon with an unusually fine music of cannons to while away the time’. The following day when the sortie was in full swing, after more card-playing, he was ordered back into the city: ‘
Sac au dos
at 4 p.m. for Paris, but from some mismanagement rested under arms till ¼ to 7 then moved forwards but felt fatigued before starting.’)

Among the regulars waiting to go into the attack, Tommy Bowles, who as usual had pressed forward as close to the front as he could get, found a rather different mood: ‘They showed little enthusiasm, I thought, their drums and trumpets were silent, and even the perpetual chatter and badinage which usually mark the progress of a French regiment were absent….’ Spirits were not improved by the inevitable chaos in the assembly areas, due to poor staff-work, such as in the past had preceded almost every initiative by the Paris garrison. Only two bridges across the Seine were available, and incredibly enough no orders had been given to remove the barricades on them, so that a hopeless tangle of men, guns, and ambulances piled up against these. There ensued, noted Bowles, ‘endless confusion and delay’. To make matters worse, once again the weather played traitor to the French. A sudden thaw on the 17th had turned the frozen earth to slippery, treacherous mud, and an opaque mist
¹
rendered
even more difficult the process of disentanglement. The front of the attack lay immediately under the guns of Mont-Valérien, across the root of the same Gennevilliers peninsula where Ducrot had originally wanted to break out in October. Trochu’s plan was to move simultaneously with three columns: Vinoy on the left against Montretout, Bellemare towards Buzenval in the centre and across what is now St.-Cloud racetrack, and Ducrot on the right marching over the scene of his earlier undertaking at Malmaison. This time it was Ducrot himself who was critically late; his delay, wrote O’Shea acidly, ‘explained by the circumstance that he had some seven and a half miles English to traverse in the dark, on a railway hampered by obstructions, and a high-road occupied by a train of artillery which had lost its way. This occurred not in Cochin-China, but a short drive from Paris, on a bit of country every feature of which could have been mastered in half an hour by an intelligent huntsman, with the aid of the staff-maps and a reconnoitring glass.’

Scheduled to begin at 6 a.m., the attack was postponed for several hours, and finally went in without Ducrot. The delay, continued O’Shea, was not ‘the only blunder which dislocated Trochu’s conception. The men of the National Guard had been kept under arms, packs on their backs and four days’ provisions, making in all a burden of four stone weight, from two in the morning. The Line, too, were haggard and worn with fatigue, and marched without elasticity of step when they got the word to go forward at ten o’clock.’ Yet the French chalked up some surprisingly encouraging initial successes. On the left Vinoy’s Zouaves, retrieving the name they had lost at Châtillon, took by surprise a Posen regiment at Montretout (an indication that even some of Moltke’s forces were no longer fighting with their usual mettle), and advanced into the outskirts of St.-Cloud itself. In the centre, Bellemare actually secured a foothold on the Garches-La Bergerie plateau, from which the Prussian guns could dominate the attacking French and which was a vital defence to Versailles. There, the whirr and rattle of the French
mitrailleuses
little more than two miles away had drawn the German Emperor on the second day of his reign to the aqueduct of Marly, whence he and his court watched the battle with anxiety. On his way to join the Emperor, Bismarck met a musketeer who ‘gives us to understand we are in a bad way, the enemy being already in the wood on the hills behind La Celle’. His secretary, Dr. Busch, noted down in his diary serious fears that the French ‘might press on further and force us to evacuate Versailles’, and the Crown Prince went so far as to reveal that on the following morning, when he ‘arrived at the Prefecture for the usual report with His Majesty, the
fourgons
were standing
there ready loaded, and all preparations had been made for a hasty departure!’ Gone was the festive mood of yesterday’s coronation; the Hall of Mirrors where the glittering kings and princes were now being replaced by rows of Prussian wounded had become, according to W. H. Russell, ‘a valley of lamentation’.

But in fact Bellemare, unsupported by Ducrot on his right, was soon stuck. The adventurous Bowles, who was on the spot, considered that

the officers, if they had been worth their salt and capable of leading their men, might, I am convinced, have taken the whole of Garches, batteries and all; but they seemed to lose their heads, and not to know what to do or whither to go, though I am sorry to say a few of them solved the latter question by going ‘back again’ down the valley. Their defects were of course not without influence upon the men.

By the afternoon, the Prussian guns had checked the attack all along the line, the French had lost their initiative without taking any of the key points, and Bowles left the battlefield that evening gloomily predicting that ‘the real struggle will begin tomorrow under anything but favourable conditions’.

Ducrot had arrived on the scene, and as usual was observed conspicuously mounted on his white charger, well ahead of his troops; once again, his incredible good luck preserved him unscathed, but his temerity did nothing to alter the course of the battle. With comparable courage, two women serving as
cantinières
seized the
chassepots
of fallen soldiers, and themselves fell in the front rank. There were grimmer scenes recorded that day. Trochu’s aide, Captain d’Hérisson, was struggling with a mount unnerved by a near miss, when he saw his orderly gallop past him: ‘He was still in the saddle. But one of the fragments of the shell had torn away the whole of the lower part of his stomach, and had carried away his intestines. The upper part of his body was only attached to the lower part by the spinal column, and there was an enormous red, gaping space from his sides to his thighs. He threw up his arms and fell, while his horse, hit in the withers, galloped off into space to the accompaniment of the clink of the empty stirrups. A cold shiver ran through me.’ To Labouchere, ‘The most painful scene during the battle was the sight
¹
of a French soldier felled by French bullets. He was a private in the 119th Battalion, and refused to advance. His commander remonstrated. The private shot him. General Bellemare, who was near,
ordered the man to be killed at once. A file was drawn up and fired on him; he fell, and was supposed to be dead. Some
brancardiers
soon afterwards passing by, and thinking that he had been wounded in the battle, placed him on a stretcher. It was then discovered that he was still alive. A soldier went up to him to finish him off, but his gun missed fire. He was then handed another, when he blew out the wretched man’s brains.’

On the whole, and particularly at Montretout, the National Guard had fought with unexpected distinction. But on Bellemare’s crucial front, Bowles now witnessed an ominous occurrence;

… on the crest of the hill, the fighting was going on heavily, and our first line, composed of Mobiles, was skirmishing in the woods some thirty yards in front. Just then a regiment of National Guards was brought up by an aide-de-camp to support them, and very pretty they looked, coming up the hill at a run, with fixed bayonets, the colonel puffing heavily in front, and the aide-de-camp brandishing his sabre and cheering them on. When they got a little below me, however, and began to hear the balls singing past their heads, they ducked to a man, with unanimity that was positively comic, slackened speed, stopped by common consent, and then falling flat on their stomachs, opened fire to the front on the Mobiles!’

It was not the only episode where the wretchedly trained National Guard lost its head. In one regiment observed by d’Hérisson, ‘the drummer beat the charge; the colonel gave the word of command,
‘En avant!’
the regiment shouted,
‘Vive la République!’
, and—nobody stirred. That went on for three hours—Ducrot appeared on the scene in person and shouted
‘En avant!’
He was answered by shouts, but nobody moved.’ A Colonel Rochebrune was killed by what was later asserted to be a bullet from one of the
tabatière
muskets issued to the National Guard; and as darkness fell, Trochu’s own party was fired upon by some disorientated National Guards, who claimed to have mistaken them for Uhlans, and a young lieutenant, de Langle de Cary, received a bullet through the chest.

It was virtually the last salute that Trochu would receive from his army. That night he recognized the Buzenval sortie had failed, and the next morning orders to withdraw were issued. But it was more than the Army’s tenuous threads of discipline could withstand. Wrote Ducrot:

Hardly was the word retreat pronounced than in the rear areas on the left the débâcle began… everything broke up, everything went…. On the roads the muddle was terrifying… across the open country the National Guards were taking to their heels in every direction…. Soldiers, wandering, lost, searched for their company, their officers.

As the National Guard streamed through the streets of Paris there were once again those piteous cries of ‘
Nous sommes trahis
’, and this time few Parisians doubted that they were nearly at the end of the line. The Buzenval battlefield presented a horrible spectacle; members of the American Ambulance told Washburn ‘the whole country was literally covered with the dead and wounded, and five hundred ambulances were not half sufficient to bring them away’. Trochu called for an armistice of two or three days, but there were those who claimed that he did so as much to underline the facts of life to the Reds as to bury the dead. The facts were certainly shocking enough; for a total of only 700 Prussian casualties, the French had lost over 4,000 in dead and wounded, of which 1,500 were from the National Guard. After the war Trochu testified that in his estimate they had themselves been responsible for one-eighth of the French casualties, but there was no doubting that in its aim of the ‘bleeding’ of the National Guard the Government had been eminently successful. To O’Shea it was ‘an indisputable crime’ to throw in the National Guard at Buzenval, and few of his fellow correspondents disagreed with him.

Bowles accompanied the defeated, bedraggled army back inside the city walls: ‘On my return to Paris I found the Avenue de la Grande Armée lined on each side by a dense crowd of people eager for news…. They listened sadly in little groups to the complaints of marching, counter-marching, hunger, want of rest, and bad leadership which constitute the staple of the National Guards’ account of the affair.’ Earlier another Englishman, William Brown, had remarked on a disturbing new phenomenon in Paris: ‘Since last night a strange change has come over the city; an enormous number of troops have left last night and some cannonading took place late, but gradually died away towards morning. All the National Guard have left; a terrible silence reigns around; not a shot is heard and everybody demands what this means; can it be that we are at last victorious and have forced the enemy’s positions and so are fighting beyond the lines, and in consequence out of hearing? Or can it be a calamity too sad to think of…?’ By the 21st, all Paris knew what the silence signified; it was, explained Goncourt, ‘the silence of death, of the kind caused by a disaster in a great city. Today one no longer hears Paris live. All faces have the look of faces of the sick, of convalescents’. More simply, Juliette Lambert just wrote: ‘
Paris est perdu
!’

Trochu had returned on the afternoon of the 20th from his battle-post at Mont-Valérien where, as he said in a superlative piece of understatement, ‘my presence was no longer useful’. Immediately a joint session of the Government and the Mayors of Paris was
summoned, at which he was called upon ‘to explain myself concerning the military situation and my personal intentions’. Trochu replied that militarily all was lost, and that he himself ‘formally refused to assume the responsibility for any new operation which would be a slaughter without any goal that was strategically justifiable’. The meeting became stormier than any in the past, with coals of fire heaped from all sides upon the Governor’s head for the failure of the Buzenval sortie. Particularly violent in their recriminations were the Mayors, led by one Georges Clemenceau of Montmartre, who still demanded a continuation of the war at all costs, saying much the same thing with the same degree of savagery as, when Premier of France forty-seven years later, he would growl, ‘
Moi, je fais la guerre
’. But the influential Favre, Trochu’s deputy, now favoured capitulation; for, during Buzenval, he had received word that Chanzy had been utterly crushed at Le Mans, losing 10,000 men. The Army of the Loire no longer existed. Now a bitter and unseemly scene took place between the two leaders, with Favre reproaching Trochu for his promise that he would ‘never surrender’, and Trochu retaliating by blaming Favre for his insistence that he would ‘cede neither an inch of territory nor a stone of our fortresses’. Dorian, who relayed the episode to Rochefort, admitted that, in spite of the pain it caused him, he felt an almost irresistible desire to laugh ‘when he heard them throw their respective boastings in each other’s face’.