Paris at the End of the World

by John Baxter

  The Home Guard

  Among themselves, Australians didn’t sing about places but people, and in particular figures from the country’s criminal past: “The Wild Colonial Boy,” “Waltzing Matilda,” and a rogues’ gallery of bushrangers, as highwaymen were called, in particular Ben Hall and the folk hero Ned Kelly. It wasn’t until the postwar rise of nationalism that they would start singing about “the track winding back to an old familiar shack along the road to Gundagai.”

  In London, Archie reported to AIF headquarters in Horseferry Road. Any serviceman who failed to do so risked being listed absent without leave and hunted down by the feared and despised military police or provosts. The Horseferry Road complex, a former Methodist training college on a dingy street near the Thames, was branded “a slum” by the official Australian war historian, and worse by the men who used it. But Archie could collect his pay there, eat (free) at the noisy, crowded Anzac buffet restaurant, funded by the Australian Natives Association, or pay for a quieter dinner at the army-run Australian Soldiers Club. After that, they’d find him a bed in one of the bleak hostels maintained for troops in transit. In between, he would have dodged the prostitutes, amateur and professional, who haunted the area, on the lookout for well-paid and free-spending Aussies.

  Next day, he probably drew a new uniform. As fleas and lice were an occupational hazard anywhere troops gathered, soldiers never missed an opportunity, in the days before dry cleaning, to boil their clothes or, better still, turn them in for a new set. Archie also received a warrant for the train journey to Norwich. This would have brought him in contact with the AIF’s notorious bureaucracy. It so enraged one anonymous serviceman that he composed a song that, in various degrees of profanity and bile, was still being sung as recently as the Vietnam War.

  He was stranded alone in London, and strode

  To Army Headquarters in Horseferry Road,

  And there met a poofter Lance Corporal, who said

  “You’ve got blood on your tunic, you’ve mud on your head;

  You look so disgraceful that people will laugh,”

  Said the cold-footed bastard from the Horseferry staff.

  The digger jumped up with a murderous glance;

  Said “Fuck you. I just came from the trenches in France

  Where fighting was plenty and cunt was for few

  And brave men are dying for mongrels like you.”

  Over the years, the song acquired numerous additions, including one with a happy ending.

  Well, the question soon came to the ears of Lord Gort

  Who gave the whole matter a good deal of thought;

  He awarded that digger a VC with bars

  For giving that Corporal a kick up the arse.

  Australians were everywhere in London. Neither their good nature nor their bombast could be ignored. It was a standing joke that every digger, true to his nickname, claimed to own a gold mine back home, or thousands of acres teeming with cattle, sheep, or, to believe the more outrageous liars, kangaroos. Both the Aussies’ thirst for beer and their belligerence when drunk were legendary, but most irritating to the British high command was their contempt for authority.

  Some officers adjusted better than others. General William Birdwood, born in India of British parents, commanded the Australians at Gallipoli, and earned their respect for his personal courage, if not for the orders imposed on him by London. Though Anzacs referred to him as “Birdy,” sometimes within his hearing, he accepted it as the price of their respect and cooperation. Supreme Allied Commander Douglas Haig believed his methods undermined discipline. “Instead of facing the problem,” he wrote, “he had gone in for saying everything is perfect, and making himself as popular as possible.”

  A story went round of Birdwood chatting with a friend in the street when an Australian soldier passed without saluting.

  “Aren’t you going to call him back and tear him off a strip?” asked the friend.

  “And be abused by one of my own men in the middle of the Strand?” Birdwood said mildly. “Why would I want that?”

  Unlike Paris, which did its best to deny the reality of war, London embraced it with the fanaticism of a monk for his hair shirt. Ordinary life was put aside. Magazines, newspapers, and books dwindled in size as paper was rationed. Voice radio, poised to become a mass medium, was taken over by the armed forces, to be used exclusively by the military, particularly on ships at sea.

  Before the war, moralists would have protested the suggestiveness of Arthur Wimperis’s lyrics for the recruiting song “I’ll Make a Man of You.” But nobody objected when they were sung in the cause of keeping up the number of volunteers.

  On Sunday I walk out with a Soldier,

  On Monday I’m taken by a Tar,

  On Tuesday I’m out with a baby Boy Scout,

  On Wednesday a Hussar;

  On Thursday a gang oot wi’ a Scottie,

  On Friday, the Captain of the crew;

  But on Saturday I’m willing, if you’ll only take the shilling,

  To make a man of any one of you.

  Crude propaganda such as Harold Begbie’s poem Fall-In took a different line, playing on the very British concern for What People Will Say.

  What will you lack, sonny, what will you lack

  When the girls line up the street,

  Shouting their love to the lads come back

  From the foe they rushed to beat?

  Will you send a strangled cheer to the sky

  And grin till your cheeks are red?

  But what will you lack when your mates go by

  With a girl who cuts you dead?

  Unrelenting peer pressure urged men of draft age to “take the king’s shilling” and enlist. Any young man not in uniform risked being handed a white feather, the symbol of cowardice. Women approaching him in the street would smile and show every sign of interest—then, as they got closer, register repugnance at his civilian clothes.

  France had self-appointed patriots too, but didn’t take them seriously. One cartoon showed the speaker at a woman’s group announcing melodramatically, “I swear I will never marry any man who returns from the trenches alive!” Nor were their critics afraid to point out that talk was cheap: the women encouraging men to fight would never have to face a bullet themselves.

  Any Briton brave enough to plead conscientious objections to the war faced the risk of elaborate cruelty, even death, certainly privation, imprisonment, hard labor. Even so, sixteen thousand applied for exemption, although few achieved it. One absolutist who refused to contribute to the war in any way, even by helping the injured, was forced into uniform and taken to the trenches under guard. He promptly stripped off the battle dress and walked back behind the lines naked.

  Some people made their point with less agony. The writer Lytton Strachey was so frail he would never have been called up, but he chose to plead conscientious objection as a way of protesting the war. Tall and gangling, with a long beard and a fussy, effeminate manner, he turned the hearing into a farce. Complaining of the hardness of the courtroom benches, he produced an air cushion, which he noisily inflated. When the chairman of the panel asked the standard question, “What would you do if you saw a German soldier about to violate your sister?” Strachey replied in his fluting falsetto, “I would try to interpose my body between them.”

  By 1917, the war was costing Britain, in today’s terms, twenty million pounds an hour, three billion pounds a week. Through sheer willpower, the country had wrenched itself from a civilian to a military economy. Women worked in factories and took over large parts of the public services. Pots, pans, and the railings around parks and churches were melted down for weapons. All food was severely rationed, not to mention beer, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Such was the need for acetone, a component of the explosive cordite, that much of the grain harvest was allocated to its fermentation. Starvation was averted only when Chaim Weizmann discovered how to make it from chestnuts. Every child in the British Isles was instantly or
dered to gather them.

  In February 1917, while Archie was in London, revolution ended the rule of the czars. That an ancient monarchy could be toppled overnight, and by the very people it ruled, shocked royalty everywhere, particularly since many crowned heads were cousins, descended from the remarkably fecund Victoria and Albert. The abdication of Nicholas II made his cousin, George V of England, who resembled him enough to be his brother, realize no throne was safe. He renounced the family name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, replacing it with Windsor, after the favorite castle of Queen Victoria. His subjects welcomed the gesture. Punch published a cartoon of his majesty, in ermine robes, using a yard broom to sweep everything German from Britain.

  Anti-Teutonic sentiment, already high, hardened as Gotha bombers flying from bases in occupied Belgium dropped high explosives on the Channel ports and, occasionally, London. The RAF’s underpowered fighters had made easy meat of lumbering low-flying zeppelins but couldn’t climb fast or far enough to attack the Gothas. All the same, many more people died than should have, because, instead of hiding, they ran out to see the show. The government responded by imposing a blackout in towns or cities within bombing range. Street lighting and illuminated signs disappeared. Heavy curtains covered every window. London reverted to the gloom of Victorian times, the funereal city evoked by Dickens in Bleak House.

  Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

  After the sunny calm of Sydney, its wide empty streets and limitless food, London was disorienting. The average Australian arriving in 1917 was, as one historian wrote, “astounded by the scale and magnificence of even a blacked-out capital, and inexpert in dealing with its more opportunistic inhabitants. Besides their awe at historic buildings they had only ever heard of, they gaped at its traffic-clogged streets, its vastness, the modernity of escalators and the wonders of the Underground.”

  A London bus conductress

  I see Archie as part of that crowd. That’s him waiting at the bus stop next to Piccadilly Circus, a tall young man, face as dreamy under the flat cap as it had been in his wedding photograph, hands shoved in the pockets of his army greatcoat, a sausage-shaped canvas kitbag beside him. As the bus arrives, he climbs onto the open back platform, wincing from the pain in his legs. The conductor, a pretty girl, grabs his bag and hauls him aboard.

  “Cummon, Aussie! Ups a daisy!”

  Her familiarity embarrasses him. He still isn’t comfortable speaking to women, least of all one as self-assured as this girl, effortlessly doing a man’s job. Once she’s clipped his ticket (a flake of card falling to join the confetti littering the platform), he hauls his bag up the spiral stairs to the open upper deck. Most passengers prefer to stay below, inside, but a few huddle up here, sufficiently interested, like him, in the sights of London not to mind the cold.

  Knowing that, one day, he’ll be asked, “What’s London really like?” he watches, dutifully, taking note: the mixture of automobiles and horse-drawn wagons in the streets below; the gray granite frontages of the City, as London’s financial center is known; the occasional church, discreet but proud and superior in that eighteenth-century way Australia will never achieve. It is, he decides tentatively, looking up into the overcast, something to do with the light.

  “Liverpool Street. Liverpool Street Station.”

  A minute later, he’s on the curb, staring up at a block-long berg of ash-gray brick. It dwarfs the people surging through its wide doors and the motor cabs that clatter up the incline to the main entrance. Not just a railway station, the complex, as befits the station serving the City, houses a hotel, shops, offices, and the largest Masonic temple in Britain. Shouldering his bag, he trudges up the slope. In May, a thousand-pound bomb from a Gotha G.V will crash through the glass roof of the main concourse and kill 162 people. Archie has no conception of such disasters, any more than millions of other people involved in this war, except that, of course, they will never happen to him.

  He is mostly aware of himself—his cold, his hunger, his loneliness. Any fears are not of bullet, bomb, or bayonet but of childish things—getting lost, looking foolish, being found out. Tears come to his eyes. Though he believed, on so gratefully leaving Australia, that he would never feel such an emotion again, he wishes he were back home.

  30

  Dancing Between the Flames

  I beached upon—imagine!—incredible Floridas

  Where panthers with the skins of men

  In flowers glide. Where rainbow bridles,

  Horizon-wide, rein the ocean’s pearly herds.

  ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “The Drunken Boat”

  No matter how catastrophic the reverses at the front, and how ominous the news that Russia, now ruled by the Communists, was negotiating a separate peace, Paris plugged its ears and covered its eyes. “The worse the war is, the more depraved the civilians become,” novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline grumbled in Journey to the End of the Night. “Women seem to have a fire in their ass. In time of war, instead of dancing in the lobby, we dance in the cellar.”

  Shifty people of every stripe gravitated to the rich pickings of a city at war. Among them were numerous rastaquouères: rastas for short, from the Spanish rastacuero, meaning social climber or nouveau riche. Rastaquouère became an all-purpose label for any suave but untrustworthy foreigner, the “oily Levantine,” typically from the eastern Mediterranean or Latin America, with enough money to live well and the manners to move in society. They were, almost by definition, crooked. Many were gamblers. Some dealt in drugs. Others worked as pimps or gigolos. Even before the war, they’d excited suspicion. The anarchist review L’Assiette au Beurre devoted an entire issue to them. The cover showed a dark-skinned hand, with a diamond ring on every finger, thrusting a knife through a queen of hearts.

  Rastas clustered around the Opéra, where, in a phrase of Pierre Darmon, “a varied fauna had taken over the cafés and bars.” The security services kept an eye on these places. Reports filed by their spies are snapshots of a hermetic and fevered world. “Seen at Ciro’s, in an ultrafantastic uniform, young R——, son of a judge of the court of appeal and a regular in the fashionable bars. Also George M———, secretary general of the theatre Michel.” A black market flourished wherever the rich hung out, such as the bar at Maxim’s restaurant on rue Royale. “At Maxim’s, a fat man with the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur explained to a couple of regulars how he got cigarettes via his member of parliament.”

  Foreign journalists congregated at the Café Napolitain on rue de Caumartin, along with artists and the better class of prostitute. In the basement oyster bar of the Cintra on Place Edouard VII, inspectors noted “pederasts both civilian and military, some of them in make-up, some young men who, astonishingly, had escaped the draft, and a number of strangers with the air of rastas.” The latter were probably there to buy or sell cocaine, or to trade in jewelry, often stolen.

  Though it limited the number of foreigners accepted into the army, the French were more welcoming to aviators, who were harder to find and died even more quickly than infantrymen. American volunteers formed the Lafayette Flying Corps, whose fliers were frequently seen around the boulevards, wearing high-laced leather boots, riding breeches, smart jackets with lots of braid, and sometimes a leather flying helmet.

  Among them was William Wellman Jr. of Brookline, Massachusetts. He volunteered to drive an ambulance, switched to the Foreign Legion, then, like Eugene Bullard, transf
erred to the Lafayette Flying Corps, achieved three confirmed “kills” and five probables, earned the Croix de Guerre, but was himself shot down. This left “Wild Bill” with a lifelong limp, which, he claimed, increased his attractiveness to women. He later married one of Busby Berkeley’s showgirls and directed such movies as Wings, Roxie Hart, and Battleground.

  Real aviators, such as Wellman and the African American Eugene Bullard, drank at the Rotonde in Montparnasse, where Bullard became friendly with the painter Moise Kisling, or at Chez le Père Lebas on rue Caumartin, where he went with another pilot, Jean Navarre. The first time Navarre took Bullard there, the regulars fell silent at the sight of his black skin. Someone said to Navarre, “Where did you get that? And what is it? Whatever it is, put it in the toilet and don’t forget to pull the chain.” Furious, Bullard, who had boxed professionally, prepared to take the bar apart—until Navarre reassured him it was just the “hazing” dished out to all new arrivals.

  Such men as Wellman and Bullard turned la mode d’aviateur into a fashion statement. In turn, it became a gay fad, like the uniform Poiret designed for Misia Sert’s ambulance service. Police scouting the métro station in front of the Opéra reported “two ‘aviators’ in make-up, wearing outrageously tight trousers, which roused the hostility of passersby and some poilus.” At the American cocktail bar in the Grand Hotel on rue Auber, they spotted more of them, “dressed in fantastic uniforms, with no badges indicating their unit, and wearing their kepis tilted on the back of their heads, like jockeys. These absurdities were regarded with disapproval by the public.”

  “Powdered type, difficult to categorize.”

  Any dedicated follower of fashion who found uniforms too butch could opt for the flâneur or boulevardier style: a flannel jacket with a nipped-in waist, slim-cut striped trousers, shoes with canvas spats, the whole topped off with a jaunty felt hat, a cane, and, often, a monocle. As this look flattered both men and women, even the police couldn’t tell them apart. At the Chatham on rue Danou and the nearby Tipperary bar, the clientele consisted of “officers, straights and shady characters, rastas, and some powdered types, difficult to categorize.”