Seven Ages of Paris (56 page)

At their hastily created army headquarters in a girls’ school just across from the Invalides, Galliéni’s staff officers moved pins on the map and realized that here was an opportunity such as occurs in few generals’ lifetimes. “They offer us their flank! They offer us their flank!” they exclaimed. Explaining the situation to Joffre, Galliéni pressed the elephantine Commander-in-Chief into turning the whole of his cumbersome great army around and launching an immediate combined offensive. Galliéni himself would unleash General Maunoury’s only recently constituted Sixth Army into a forceful attack out of Paris, into Kluck’s exposed flank. The omens were hardly good. The Sixth Army units had only just arrived, exhausted, after long forced marches. The whole of the seven armies under Joffre’s command—including General French’s small but heroic British Expeditionary Force—were also tired out after a month of retreats, dispiriting defeats and heavy casualties. On the other hand, Galliéni could note with satisfaction that the populace of Paris (those who hadn’t already fled) were displaying “calm and resolution.” The German army was exhausted; in the coming battle many German prisoners were actually taken asleep, unable to move another step. As of that first week of September, only the scent of victory, the shimmering vision of Paris in the near distance, kept them moving—as it had Napoleon’s Grande Armée of a century earlier; and, seeing the state of fatigue of his own men, Kluck fatally convinced himself that the beaten enemy was in no condition to stage a come-back, or to turn itself about.

But 4 and 5 September were two more of the darkest days for the alliance. Up to this point Joffre had been prepared to sacrifice Paris, in marked contrast to Galliéni, who remained convinced that the capital had to be defended—à outrance. In the previous ten days alone, France had lost the important cities of Lille, Valenciennes, Arras, Amiens, Cambrai, Laon and Soissons, as well as Rheims—where all the kings of France from Clovis to Louis XIV had been crowned—abandoned as an open city on 3 September. Kluck was already across the Seine south-east of Paris, and was still advancing. From his army’s behaviour in neutral Belgium, it seemed quite clear to the French that the Kaiser would not spare Paris any more than Bismarck had. In London Allied leaders met to sign a pact binding each other not to make a separate peace. It was a measure of desperation and alarm. In Paris General Maunoury asked Galliéni, “In case we should be overwhelmed, our line of retreat will be … ?” “Nowhere” was Galliéni’s reply. To all his subordinate commanders he issued highly secret orders to list all resources in each district that had to be destroyed rather than fall into enemy hands. Even bridges in the heart of the city, like the sacred Pont Neuf, were to be blown up. A “void” had to be left in front of the enemy—comparable to what Napoleon had found in Moscow in 1812—in case the Germans should break through, he instructed General Hirschauer. The modern imagination quails before such a prospect, though it was one which, just thirty years later, the German commander in Paris in August 1944, General von Choltitz, would come close to facing.

That afternoon, after a passionate appeal to General French to turn the retreating British forces about, Joffre, from his makeshift general headquarters near the battlefront, issued the order that would ring down through history: “We are going to fight on the Marne.” With his extraordinary capacity for calm (that rather un-French characteristic) which was Joffre’s signal contribution to victory, he then sat back to await results. On the 6th the great Allied counter-offensive began. The first blow came from Paris, with 60,000 men of General Maunoury’s forces who had barely detrained rushed to the front. It was the famous “Taxis of the Marne” that won the battle. Six hundred of the little red Renault taxis, so familiar to tourists, plied back and forth to the Ourcq battlefield, only sixty kilometres distant. Each carrying five soldiers, they made the round-trip twice in the day, rushing up the reinforcements crucial to Maunoury’s attack.

The immediate tactical effect of this attack was to force Kluck to swing his flank westwards to meet the threat. As a result, a critical gap fifty kilometres wide opened up between his left and Bülow’s Second Army. Into this gap marched French’s battered army and the French Fifth Army. To their right, in command of a newly formed Ninth Army, the fiery General Foch, whose irrepressible passion for l’attaque, toujours l’attaque had proved an expensive liability in the lost Battle of the Frontiers, now came into his own with his famous order: “Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente. J’attaque!” But it was Galliéni and Paris who remain the true heroes of the Marne—Galliéni, the man whose aperçu turned defeat into a sparkling victory. After three days of battle, on 9 September Bülow ordered his army to fall back over the Marne. Two days later the retreat became general.

Sadly, exhaustion and the slowness of the attacking Allies prevented them from pressing their advantage to roll up the whole enemy front. For the next four grim years the front congealed into a line of static trench warfare reaching from the Channel to the Swiss frontier. But the “Miracle of the Marne” provided a battered France with an immeasurable psychological victory. Germany had in fact lost the war, though it would take another four—or thirty—years to persuade her of this. But at what a cost for France: in the two weeks that the terrible Battle of the Frontiers lasted, she had lost over 300,000 men killed, wounded or missing, including 4,778 officers—representing no less than one-tenth of her total officer strength; while by the end of the first five months of the war in killed alone the French army had lost 300,000 men (or nearly a fifth more than Britain’s total dead in the whole of the Second World War). France had also lost nearly 12 per cent of all her territory, comprising 16.3 per cent of her manufacturing capacity, 20.4 per cent of the wheat crop and 49.48 per cent of sugar-beet production, while nearly 900,000 hungry and destitute refugees had taken to the roads. Alsace-Lorraine remained firmly in enemy hands.

Nevertheless, Paris was saved. The government returned. Life slowly came back to a semblance of normality. The theatres reopened, though only for “serious productions”; light entertainment still seemed somehow inappropriate to the now sombre mood of the country. Absinthe remained banned. As the country digested the disasters of August 1914 and then the Miracle of the Marne, and settled down to the dreadful battles of attrition of 1915, a feeling almost of smugness pervaded Paris. With details (not all of them substantiated) of German atrocities flooding in from Belgium and the occupied territories, there was a growing sense that “France equalled Civilization, Germany, Barbarism.”

THE FRONT AND THE REAR

On 14 February 1916, Lord Bertie recorded, “A big German attack is expected between Verdun and Rheims … The French are very confident. ‘Let them come,’ they say of the Germans, ‘So much the better. Let them all come.’ ” This misplaced display of confidence heralded the beginning of the cruellest year of the war. Caught horribly unprepared at Verdun, France would suffer over 400,000 casualties; the Germans, attacking along a front only twenty-five kilometres in width, were to lose almost as many. In the ten months that it lasted, the Battle of Verdun was to gain grim repute as the worst battle in history. One more German miscalculation of enormous proportions, it would end in one of the most glorious victories in all France’s history; yet its terrible cost would show her the way to defeat a generation later. Nineteen-sixteen was also, for Britain, the year of the Somme, the year when her new armies came of age in that dreadful bloodletting, on whose first day alone 60,000 young Britons and Empire troops would fall. The hero of the Marne, Galliéni, would retire and die; Joffre would be sacked—and so would his German opposite number, the chilly Falkenhayn, who had intended to “bleed France white” at Verdun. Russia would launch her last offensive before succumbing to revolution. In Paris, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon would be displayed for the first time; and the strange, nihilist new vogue called Dadaism would have its debut, perhaps marking the beginning of the end of one of the most fertile eras for the arts in the entire history of Paris.

By 1916 conditions of life behind the French lines stood roughly midway between those prevailing in Germany and those in Britain—which had still not mobilized her war effort to the same extent as France. While Germany was suffering privation under the Royal Navy’s blockade, the French civilian population experienced few commodity shortages (the exception, of course, was in the occupied north-east). Coal was scarcest of all, some 40 per cent of French production having been lost after the German invasion of the Lille region, and Paris came to dread the onset of winter. But, despite the agricultural losses, food rationing never became a serious issue. In 1914, the making of croissants was forbidden, only to be allowed again five months later. In the autumn of 1915 the government took powers to requisition all cereal products at fixed prices, and the following year sugar, milk and eggs were brought within these provisions, but little use was made of them. As in the United States after Pearl Harbor, the authorities ordered a meatless day each week, though it was hardly enforced. Meanwhile, food-loving citizens might complain, but they exploited the black market so efficiently that throughout 1916 the food scarcity barely infringed on them. Not until 1917, when the U-boat campaign had reached its peak, was a Ministry of Food set up in Paris. Straightaway it instructed butchers to close their shops for two days each week, banned bakers from selling fancy cakes, and at last with great reluctance started to distribute ration cards.

On the rare occasions when he was granted leave, the permissionaire from the slaughter at Verdun was inclined to head for Paris. Though it was only 250 kilometres away, visiting the capital was like crossing into another country, and to many a front-line poilu* it seemed that Paris knew nothing whatever about the war. Indeed the official censor, nicknamed “Anastasie,” ensured that the truth about Verdun was as far as possible kept out of the newspapers. The inherent liveliness of Paris, always hard to subdue, had begun to break free from the constraints of the first part of the war so that, by mid-1916, it showed to a battered world a façade of astonishing brilliance. To the weary permissionaires from Verdun it represented an invigorating exoticism. Rather as London was to do in the 1940s, Paris seemed to have assembled every uniform and race loyal to the Allied cause, with Moroccans, Senegalese, Annamites and Malgaches mingling on the Champs-Elysées with cavalry officers, Foreign Legionnaires, Highlanders, nurses and American flyers from the volunteer Lafayette Squadron. The Opéra and the theatres had reopened after the Marne. Crowds converged on the Folies Bergère to see Mistinguett; Sarah Bernhardt, though now old and fading, devoted her spare time from the theatre to her hospital for the wounded at the Odéon; at the Opéra Comique Manon was playing, and in May, just when the German army was unleashing its furious assault at Verdun, the film Salammbô was given a glamorous première. But France’s military predicament had not been forgotten. Patriotism surfaced in one theatrical production after another: at the end of a show celebrating the birth of Molière, Marthe Chenal came on wrapped in a tricolore to give an ardent performance of the Marseillaise; and in the music halls most nights the new favourites brought over by the British, “Tipperary” and “Roses of Picardy,” and, of course, the now universally treasured “Quand Madelon,” the “Lili Marlene” of France in the Great War, were sung with gusto.

In 1914 the art schools had a neglected air. The models had gone to work in the munitions factories, and instead of students there were elderly bourgeois looking for something to distract them. The ranks of the creative arts were rapidly depleted, as we have seen. Yet somehow the galleries of Paris were reopened and trading briskly, and publishers had never sold so many books.

Those on leave from the trenches of Verdun regarded their country’s lively capital with mixed feelings. For Captain Delvert, a company commander, the crowds of elegant women walking in the Bois de Boulogne with their escorts reminded him sourly “of a national holiday or Longchamp Races … It appears that the nation is suffering and that all energies are being strained towards the goal of ultimate victory; however this effort does not diminish the number of promenaders.” It was with feelings of relief that Delvert returned to his regiment at Verdun. In Henri Barbusse’s great war novel, Le Feu, published that year, 1916, one of the characters comments bitterly while on leave, “We are divided into two foreign countries. The front, over there, where there is too much misery, and the rear, here, where there is too much contentment.”

For all the bravado of Paris, the war was inevitably giving rise to distortions and corruptions that by 1916 were rankling increasingly with the men at the front. There were the embusqués, who had continued to evade the war and the call-up, and the profiteers, who had already made large fortunes (and were speedily enriching the restaurateurs and the jewellers—as Captain Delvert noted). Even the meanest worker in a war factory was being paid a hundred sous a day, against the poilu’s five. As a result, inflation was accelerating; at the start of 1916, the cost-of-living index had hit 120 (July 1914 = 100), and by the end of the year it would be 135. The black market thrived, and occasionally the authorities had to beg citizens to stop hoarding gold. Expensive mistakes had been made at the outset of the war: agricultural production had been hampered by the number of peasants conscripted, and before long some had had to be sent back to the fields; the giant Renault motor works was shut down, apart from a small shop making stretchers (motor vehicles apparently being regarded as a luxury). But the economy somehow kept going, under what was mockingly called système D, a derivation from the verb se débrouiller, meaning “to muddle through.” Less innocent than the disruptions caused by système D were the scandals such as that which came to light in 1916 of Hospital 27, where a dishonest doctor had been selling fake discharges from the army for several thousand francs each. The offenders escaped with trifling sentences, and it was widely believed that Deputies and even ministers had instituted a cover-up.