The Fall of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  On November 26th, all the gates to the city were closed (giving the Prussians final confirmation of what was about to happen), and in the stampede to get in Goncourt saw a poor old man knocked over on a drawbridge, his spine broken. On the 28th, Washburne recorded that all the American ambulance waggons had been ordered to stand by to move at 6 a.m. the next morning; ‘there is something in the atmosphere and the general appearance of the city that betokens unusual events. The day is damp, chilly, gloomy and cloudy, but the streets are filled.’ That night, awoken by an immense cannonade which even out at Versailles had deprived an anxious King of Prussia of his sleep, Goncourt climbed up to the roof of his building. There, ‘in a night without stars’, he saw

  from Fort Bicêtre as far as Fort Issy, over the whole stretch of this great semicircular line, a succession of small dots of fire that flicker up like gas-jets, followed by sonorous echoes. These great voices of death in the midst of the silence of the night stir one. After some time the howling of dogs joins in with the thunder of the cannon; frightened voices of awoken humans begin whispering; cockerels, men and women, everything lapses back into silence and my ear, straining out of the window, could hear nothing more than the cannonade in the distance, far in the distance, resembling the dull noise that an oar makes when it strikes the side of a boat.

  On rising the next morning, Parisians found their walls plastered with proclamations heralding the Great Sortie. One, emanating from Trochu, was his shortest yet; the other, addressed by Ducrot to the Second Army (of which he was now the commander), ended on a note of immortal magnificence, evocative of all the military grandeur de la France. ‘As for myself,’ he declared, ‘I have made up my mind, and I swear before you and the entire nation; I shall only re-enter Paris dead or victorious. You may see me fall, but you will not see me yield ground. So do not halt, but avenge me. En avant donc! en avant, que Dieu nous protége!’ Parisian hearts beat loudly; how could the day not be won when the commander himself could make such a vow? ‘Here is a real soldier!’ cried Juliette Lambert.

  Behind the scenes all was far from well. Bowles, who had passed the whole of the previous day at outposts near Issy, had picked up sinister ‘whisperings of “pontoons” and bridges having become a difficulty at the last moment’. At dawn on the 29th Trochu, was at his battle H.Q. in Fort Rosny ‘when General Ducrot, in a state of indescribable agitation, came to report to me that a sudden rise in the level of the Marne had temporarily rendered our operation impossible’. In the first stage of the breakthrough, Ducrot’s primary objective was the heights around Villiers on the left bank of the Marne. All the Marne bridges having been blown at the time of the investment, everything depended on the provision of sufficient pontoons so that bridgeheads could be established at Bry and Champigny on either side of the Villiers loop. The pontoons had been successfully towed across Paris from the original site of the sortie, and by the night of the 28th were in readiness at Charenton. At 11 p.m., Ducrot’s chief engineer, Krantz, had given the order to advance the pontoon-train from the Seine into the Marne, through the St.-Maurice canal which lay just in French hands. Headed by the tug Persévérance, the canal was safely negotiated, but at Joinville it was brought to a halt. Here the Marne is perhaps a little wider than the Thames at Maidenhead, but even under normal conditions the current is much swifter. Now the debris of the destroyed Joinville bridge had formed a kind of barrage across the river; two out of three arches were blocked, though the third was navigable, provided there was no substantial rise in the water. This was a danger foreseen by Krantz, and ideally—as Ducrot admitted—the river under the other arches should have been cleared to avert it. But there had been no time; it was one of the ‘omissions’ which had had to be risked. And heavy rains had in fact swollen the Marne, so that torrents of angry water were surging through the one clear arch. The puffing Persévérance was brought to a standstill. It retired, fired its boilers almost to bursting-point, and then tried to charge the bridge again. This time it gained ground, and there seemed hope of its getting through, when three pontoons foundered, with their crews; causing a lengthy delay before another attempt could be made. At its third effort the Persévérance succeeded, but by now it was clearly too late to hope of getting the pontoons in position before daybreak.

  Once again Ducrot saw all his plans collapsing about him, and it was in a state bordering on despair that he came to see Trochu. What was to be done? Call off the whole operation? Immediately both generals agreed that of this there could be no question; apart from anything else, the threat of revolt in Paris by a disappointed mob was still too grave to be risked. Not for the first or last time this factor, more than any military consideration, was the deciding one. So the main offensive would be postponed twenty-four hours, until the Marne subsided; meanwhile the subsidiary actions planned to be thrown in on the wings would still proceed that day, unsupported. It was a decision that hardly pleased Vinoy, who was to execute the principal of these diversions, and the lost twenty-four hours were just long enough for Moltke, now precisely aware of Ducrot’s intentions, to push a division of Saxons in behind the weak Württemberger force covering the focal point of the line.

  Paris, remained happily unaware of the latest hitch in ‘Le Plan’. In transports of delight, Juliette Lambert exclaimed (prematurely) in her journal: ‘Enfin! Enfin! Yesterday, while we were at the opera, the Great Sortie began! This great action, which Paris has been awaiting for two months, has been launched. What emotions are ours…!’ All through the 29th, Goncourt observed a general mood, quite alien to the city, of ‘concentrated meditation. In the public vehicles no one speaks; everybody has retired within himself, and women of the street regard what goes on round them with a blind man’s stare…. Any man who speaks, who suggests knowledge, is besieged.’ Little knots of anxious citizens hovered outside Government buildings and on the main thoroughfares leading to the battlefield, hoping for fragments of news. The strain of the suspense was intolerable. By the evening Goncourt found himself unusually irritable with his circle at Brébant’s.

  On the other side of the ramparts, Bismarck’s secretary, Dr. Moritz Busch, who happened to be visiting an officer’s mess, found the lieutenants in confident high spirits: ‘having all sorts of fun… singing the song of the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne’.

  The first news to be posted up outside the Hôtel de Ville was encouraging to the Parisians. ‘All General Ducrot’s divisions have crossed the Marne!’ As usual, Paris fastened on this early glimmer of hope, building out of it a resounding victory. Bourse prices ran up their biggest gains since September, and Louis Péguret, writing to his sister in the provinces, related how, at the ramparts that morning ‘some artillerymen told us that the battle was receding farther and farther from Paris towards the South; a little more and the Armies of the Loire and Paris will join hands.’ O’Shea overheard an old man say that ‘he did not think they should go to Berlin! Mainz would be far enough.’ Then, at 9 p.m. that night, out came an official communiqué stating baldly, ‘The object the Governor had in view has been attained’. To anyone acquainted with the Government’s delicate fibbery and still capable, after ten weeks of siege, of reading between its lines, it was only too plain that Ducrot had not broken through.

  At the front the initial, and seemingly most delicate, stage of the operation had in fact gone off smoothly. By dawn on the 29th Ducrot had assembled enough pontoons to throw across bridgeheads at both Champigny and Bry. Under cover of a tremendous barrage from Fort Nogent and from guns massed in the St.-Maur peninsula, the French succeeded in capturing and holding these two towns, without too much difficulty, during the morning. It was when they surmounted the steep escarpments leading up on to the Villiers plateau that they first ran into serious trouble. The Württembergers had established their centres of resistance in the parks of two châteaux, one at Cœuilly and the other at Villiers, and from positions carefully prepared behind stone walls in these parks their invisible riflemen directed a murderous fire o
n the attackers. The owner of the Château de Cœuilly, who had fled into Paris on the approach of the Germans, was with Ducrot, patriotically laying the French guns on to his own property (the châtelaine of Villiers, with perhaps equal courage, stayed in her home throughout the battle), and his shells exacted a heavy toll among the defenders. Three times the French attacked with a heroism which showed that, despite the long saga of defeats, the legendary furia francese was not totally dead. But each attempt collapsed, leaving heaps of blue-and-scarlet figures to enliven the seared winter grass, none closer than 150 yards to the park of Cœuilly. Casualties reached almost 1914 proportions; one regiment, the 42nd, lost its colonel and four hundred men. At Villiers the story was the same. Here it was the Zouaves, determined to erase the shame of their performance at Châtillon; but driven to despair at being decimated by a well-entrenched enemy (once again, a foretaste of the First World War) who never revealed himself.

  The start of the Great Sortie had thrown the journalists of Paris into a frenzy of activity, and, accompanied by Gustave Doré and other war artists, they rushed about in little groups, trying to get first hand accounts from the returning wounded. But, not unlike the eminent war correspondents derided in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, most of them were satisfied with composing lurid descriptions of the fighting from a judicious distance. Of the Anglo-American contingency, hardly any troubled to get a laissez-passer to visit the front during the whole Siege. The outstanding exception was the least experienced, Tommy Bowles, and it is his eyewitness report of November 30th that seems the most trustworthy, as well as the most vivid. Bowles had established himself on a hill at Créteil, just west of the St.-Maur loop of the Marne and only five hundred yards from the Prussian lines, and from here he had a spectacular view of Ducrot’s men attacking southwards towards the Mesly heights in support of the main Champigny–Bry thrust. Shot and shell from the St.-Maur batteries whistled over the heads of the troops waiting in reserve behind Bowles. These included, he noted, the 170th (Belleville) Battalion of the

  National Guard, at the front for the first time, and he was curious to see how it would behave. From a battery of field guns

  … I saw the French skirmishers dotted thickly along the flank of the hill at a distance of 300 yards, and, a short distance beyond, the Prussians firing on them from the wood. In a minute or two the fusillade began in earnest—a rolling, rattling, crackling fire, which now and then swelled into a continuous roar. The road on the right was partially hidden by trees, but I could see the Prussian barricade indicated by an incessant curtain of white smoke, which distinguished it from the rest of the line, where the action was yet indicated only by little detached puffs. Suddenly the smoke of the barricade cleared off and was not renewed, and the instant after I saw a swarm of men running rapidly at and disappearing behind the barricade, which was thus taken at the point of the bayonet. The skirmishers on the left nevertheless continued in their position, running only to and fro along their line, while the Prussians kept up a vigorous fusillade, as we knew in the battery, for the balls occasionally fell around us, we being on higher ground and in the line of fire. Over the Marne I could see the red trousers swarming up the hills beyond Champigny, and the artillery alternately galloping up and firing, while the Prussian line had already—this was eleven o’clock—disappeared over the crest.

  The prospects looked favourable, but, half an hour later Bowles was reporting that the action to his immediate front

  … seemed to warm, and some of the French skirmishers began to fall back—in very good order, however—firing and turning slowly. Wounded men, pale and bloody, now began to arrive, some borne on brancards.

  For half an hour I followed the action from my post; but then impatience got the better of me, and I took horse and rode along towards the front….

  Reaching a captured Prussian barricade, Bowles was met

  … by a crowd of breathless men swarming around and through it, and running to the shelter of a wall on the right of the road. Beyond I could see others running up, and as I foresaw confusion I thought it best to return, which I did under a considerably increased accompaniment of balls. As I re-entered the village and came upon the supports, I was eagerly questioned by officers and men. ‘Nous battons en retraite, n’est-ce-pas?’ said they, feverishly; and I was forced to reply that I thought so. The Belleville Battalion was there, and their remarks were not calculated to inspire confidence in their courage. ‘Nous sommes battus’, they said, looking with pale faces at one another, while some of them silently left the ranks, and walked with a careless air towards the rear.

  Advancing again, I found that the skirmishers were huddled up rather than rallied behind their wall, while the road, which before had been perfectly deserted, was covered with stragglers making for the village in a weary, downcast way. To them from the front came a gendarme, who rode about furiously, asking them, ‘Are you wounded?’ and on the negative reply, bidding them with oaths to return to the front. I saw that the fortune of battle had, indeed, distinctly turned. The French were now running fast back over the crest of the hill, and the supports had retired with the artillery into the valley in a line with the village on the right. As I was looking I saw the Prussian artillery appear on the hill, make a half turn, and send a shell instantaneously into the village, where it blew a house behind me into shatters….

  It was now half past twelve. I returned to the Place in the centre of the village opposite to the church. Such a scene as there grew up before me in a moment or two I hope I shall never behold again. The pavement was covered with wounded men, generally half-undressed, and lying there helplessly, while one surgeon was doing his best to attend to them. In the middle of the Place a seething mob of soldiers of all arms struggled and wrestled to get through the village, without order, without leaders, without any idea what to do or whither to go, unless it were to avoid the Prussians. Every moment the mob increased, with every moment the panic became greater and the struggle to get through fiercer. They fought with each other, they swayed to and fro, a moving mass of men and gleaming arms, they pressed out on either side till they filled the little Place, and trampled even on their wounded comrades, whom the first comers had avoided. It was not an army that was retreating, it was not even a respectable mob. But this attack was but a diversion, and the main result of the engagement was entirely successful….

  Here Bowles was deceived. What he had witnessed was all too faithful a miniature of that which was to follow in the afternoon on the Villiers plateau. Riding about the front with utter fearlessness on a magnificent white charger, pushing defaulters back into the line at the point of his sabre, Ducrot watched the frontal assaults on Villiers and Cœuilly bog down. He had expected the Villiers plateau, key to the whole operation, to be a tough nut to crack frontally and therefore had detailed off the whole of III Corps, led by General d’Exea, to carry out a powerful flanking operation. D’Exea was to cross the Marne further upstream at Neuilly, capture Noisy-le-Grand, and then move on Villiers from the north-east. He was the Blücher of that day, but a Blücher who did not arrive in time. His crossing of the Marne was badly slowed up by the shortage of pontoons, so that not until midday had the bulk of III Corps got across. Furiously Ducrot kept training his glasses on his left flank, but still no sign of d’Exea. Then at last he saw a dense mass of men approaching him from the direction of Noisy. His heart leaped, and he sent off a cavalry detachment to hasten the tardy d’Exea towards his objective. But the scouts were met with a volley of rifle shots; the force spotted by Ducrot was in fact the first body of Saxons ordered up by Moltke to reinforce the Württembergers. Coolly Ducrot commanded the men around him to lie down, take aim, but hold their fire. Not until the enemy were at point-blank range did Ducrot give the order to fire; he himself ‘broke his sword in the body of a German soldier’, and the Saxons fell back in disarray.

  At last one of d’Exea’s divisions, commanded by the de Bellemare of Le Bourget fame who had at last received the promotion he coveted
, was seen advancing slowly from its bridgehead. But to Ducrot’s intense rage it was advancing in the wrong direction; not on Noisy-le-Grand, but obliquely towards Bry which had been in French hands since early morning, where it only further encumbered an already saturated area, getting hopelessly mixed up with troops of other divisions. It was now 3 p.m., and it was clear that there could be no flank attack on Villiers that day. Still the costly frontal attempts continued, but in vain. In another hour the short winter day began to fade, leaving the French spearhead precariously perched on the Villiers plateau to face the dreaded Prussian counter-attacks that could be expected the next day. By that evening Ducrot knew the Great Sortie had failed. The sensible thing he knew, too, would have been to withdraw back across the Marne; but once again fear of the Paris mob overruled good sense. Besides, after his flamboyant proclamation, how could he return—alive, but unvictorious?

  The various diversionary efforts on other parts of the front had also ended in costly failures. At Choisy-le-Roi and L’Hay alone Vinoy had lost a thousand in dead and wounded, and 300 prisoners. Only at the north of Paris had the Marines, operating from St.-Denis under Admiral de la Roncière le Noury, scored a minor success in taking a village called Épinay-sur-Seine; but this was itself to have unattended repercussions as disastrous as the failure at Villiers. In Paris, the Government rivalled the. street in its eagerness to read unqualified success into the random bulletins reaching it from the front. On the late afternoon of the 30th, Jules Favre, its acting head, drafted a hasty dispatch for Gambetta reporting a successful crossing of the Marne, as well—en passant—as the capture of Épinay. Two balloons, one propitiously called the Bataille de Paris, the other Jules Favre No. 2, were standing by to carry this vital message, so that for once there would be no delay in informing Tours. Strong and favourable winds wafted. both balloons swiftly to the west, but disaster nearly overtook the Jules Favre No. 2 when it was blown out over the Brittany coast. With great luck the pilot managed to make a crash landing in Belle-Île, ripping off in his descent the roof of a house which, by the wildest of coincidences, belonged to no other than the brother of Trochu himself. According to Henry Vizetelly of the Illustrated London News, his mother, aged eighty-four had been ‘praying during the night for some sign from heaven that her son would yet save France, and she had interpreted the noise of the crashing rafters in a favourable sense.’ The crew of the balloon were badly injured, but by the evening following its dispatch the news from Paris was in Gambetta’s hands. His hopes were raised no less high than Mme Trochu’s had been, and with as little justification. Of Épinay Gambetta had never heard, but on glancing at the map his eye at once lit upon an Épinay-sur-Orge, a few kilometres south of Orly. Joy of joys! This must mean not only that Ducrot had broken out across the Marne but that he was now well on his way to the rendezvous at Fontainebleau. Issuing a dramatic order of the day, he instructed his generals, Aurelle and Chanzy, to march on Fontainebleau post-haste, without pausing to concentrate. Thus it came about that the amateur strategist allowed himself to commit one of the deadliest sins known to the professional—the division of his forces. And meanwhile the most professional of Moltke’s army commanders, Prince Frederick-Charles, had arrived from Metz and was all set to strike his first blow against the Army of the Loire.