Seven Ages of Paris (57 page)

Despite her terrible losses and her suffering, France—like Germany—demonstrated an extraordinary solidarity. Giving powerful impetus to this solidarity was the Union Sacrée by which men of all political hues buried their differences in the interests of national unity. So the anti-militarist and crypto-anarchist Anatole France first tried to enlist, aged seventy, and then resumed his seat among the Conservatives of the Académie which he had abandoned shortly after the Dreyfus Affair; and the fiercely anticlerical Clemenceau was seen to kiss an abbé on both cheeks.

Another great source of solidarity was the women of France. War had brought them, particularly the Parisiennes, an emancipation. When hostilities began they had hastened to become nurses, to take over the administrative tasks left by the men, and to work in the munitions factories. No doubt to start with, the women were attracted by the glamour of the nurse’s uniform and by a desire for adventure; later, as those who had not lost a husband, lover or brother became fewer and fewer, their motives became more evidently selfless. Most of them had become marraines (or godmothers) to one or more soldiers, supplying them with everything from cheering letters to food parcels and woollies—and even with the highest service a woman can offer a man. It was no wonder that, as a source of inspiration, “Quand Madelon” had almost replaced the Marseillaise.

* Poilus (literally, the hairy ones) were the equivalent of the British “Tommy” and the U.S. “doughboy,” the private of the respective armies.

MUTINY, CLEMENCEAU AND KRUPP

The winter of 1916–17 in Paris was, in the words of contemporaries, un rude hiver—bitterly cold. Luxuries and even some foodstuffs were in short supply. Propagandists made much of the “glorious victory” at Verdun, where Fort Douaumont had finally been retaken in December, marking the end of the ten-month battle. The Germans had indeed been stopped, the only significant strategic defeat inflicted on them since the Miracle of the Marne, but at an almost suicidal cost. Even “Anastasie” could not entirely conceal from Parisians the full extent of the casualties, unspeakable in themselves since caused almost entirely by the never-ending heavy artillery barrages. Too many poilus from Verdun had spent their permissions in Paris to keep it quiet. A serious malaise afflicted those in the know about the state of morale in the army. But here now was a brave new general, Nivelle, to replace the exhausted “Papa” Joffre, and to introduce a new “formula,” heralding a new offensive. And, as the year wore on, most exhilarating for Parisian morale in the streets were the first contingents of American troops, who would surely win the war for the battered Allies, taking the place of the heroic “Nijinskys” as, in the east, a broken Russia sued for peace. The advent of new money, as well as new soldiers, provoked fresh sparkle as in the cabarets nude women danced and posed on the stage for the Allies.

Alas, Nivelle’s new formula led only to new disasters. Too much talked about in advance, it permitted Hindenburg and Ludendorff to dig in and prepare for it. On 16 April, the French infantry—exhilarated by all they had been promised—left their trenches on the Chemin des Dames with an élan unsurpassed in all their glorious history. By the following day, they had suffered something like 120,000 casualties. The Medical Service, seldom brilliant (in one hospital there were reported to be only four thermometers for 3,500 beds), was completely overwhelmed. In the rear areas, some 200 wounded assaulted a hospital train. Nivelle persisted with his offensive—but he had broken the French army. Men on leave waved red flags and sang revolutionary songs, imported from Russia. They beat up military police and railwaymen, and uncoupled engines to prevent trains leaving for the front. Interceding officers, including at least one general, were set upon.

On 3 May full-scale mutiny broke out. The 21st Division—which, significantly, had gone through some of the worst fighting at Verdun the previous year—was ordered into battle, but, to a man, it refused. The ringleaders were weeded out, summarily shot or sent to Devil’s Island. But unit after unit followed the 21st, some of them the finest in the French army, and over 20,000 men deserted outright. Perhaps the most astonishing feature of the mutiny, however, was that no inkling of it was picked up by German Intelligence until order had been completely restored by the new chief, General Philippe Pétain, the Hero of Verdun. Indeed, almost to the end of the twentieth century, details remained veiled in secrecy. How many brave men were shot summarily can only be guessed, though accounts occasionally surfaced of whole units marched out to quiet sectors of the front and then deliberately shelled by their own artillery. Along with these draconian measures, Pétain—nicknamed “le Médecin de l’Armée”—introduced relatively minor improvements in the French army which had been common to the British forces for most of the war.

In Paris throughout this grim period there abounded rumours that had previously been submerged of profiteering, conspiracy and treason, espionage and defeatism. Political leaders like Joseph Caillaux were contemplating a compromise peace; while more sinister were the activities of the out-and-out defeatists, ranged around the Bonnet Rouge newspaper and headed by Malvy, a former Minister of the Interior, and of the downright traitors who earned millions of francs from German sources for their work of demoralization. It was not until well into 1917 that the reckoning came: Malvy was sentenced to five years’ banishment, the glamorous spy Mata Hari (possibly innocent, certainly insignificant) shot. Censors fought hard to suppress songs expressing disenchantment, pacifist sentiments, and socialist and revolutionary appeals. Meanwhile the poilus’s war-weariness began to infect Parisian workers. For many of the more privileged denizens of Paris, however, life still continued much as before. Dining at the Ritz with other members of his coterie including Jean Cocteau, Proust watched the first great air-raid on Paris by heavy Gotha bombers. As the warning sirens sounded from the Eiffel Tower, Cocteau chirped, “Someone’s trod on the Eiffel Tower’s toe, it’s complaining.”

Politically, however, the situation in Paris was dire. The miraculous Union Sacrée collapsed, as the Socialists withdrew their support. There was one hope left: Clemenceau. The stormy petrel of French politics for over forty years, already a grown man and Mayor of Montmartre during the Siege and the Commune, leader of the Radicals, and now an old man of seventy-six, Clemenceau was in himself a kind of one-man committee of public safety. From now on the war would be waged relentlessly and ruthlessly: truly à outrance. In the inimitable words of Winston Churchill, “The last desperate stroke had to be played. France had resolved to unbar the cage and let her tiger loose upon all foes, beyond the trenches or in her midst.” With the arrival of the old Tiger, assisted by Pétain and a redeemed Foch, and backed by the U.S. Expeditionary Force commander General Pershing and his doughboys, everything began to change.

It was as well for France and the Alliance that there was a Clemenceau waiting in the wings at this juncture in history: 1918 was to see the most dangerous period of the war since 1914. German forces liberated from the east by the collapse of Russia enabled Ludendorff in March 1918 to launch a massive offensive aimed directly at Paris. Astutely Ludendorff struck at the hinge of the French and British armies, tearing a great hole in the British front through which his troops poured to the very gates of Amiens, and to Château Thierry, a hundred kilometres from Paris. Once again Paris lived under threat.

Then, on 24 March 1918, Lord Bertie recorded a new venture in Teutonic frightfulness. Explosions suddenly occurred in the middle of Paris, without warning and with no aircraft in the sky. Soon they were reckoned to be caused by shells from a super-long-range gun, firing from inside the German lines over 110 kilometres away. Once again, the genius of Herr Krupp had contributed a new hazard to civilization. The first shell landed in the east end, on the Quai de la Seine in the 19th arrondissement. Thereafter they followed at intervals of about half an hour. One shell landed on the Gare de l’Est, killing eight people and injuring another thirteen. “Such a lovely day,” added Lord Bertie.

Unlike the relatively feeble Prussian cannon of 1870, the Paris Gun was a weapon of sheer terror, unjustified by any urge for retaliation. Clearly the Germans hoped that, coupled with the Ludendorff offensive, the continued bombardment would break the French will to resist. A masterpiece of German technical engineering, the Paris Gun was some thirty-five metres long and weighed 138 tonnes, but accuracy was extremely limited: although, wickedly, the gun was aimed at the Louvre, not a single shot hit this huge target. Even so, on Good Friday, 29 March, a shell struck the church of Saint-Gervais during Mass. Seventy-five people were killed outright and ninety injured, and many more died later. Ambassador Bertie noted that day, “People are getting away from Paris as fast as there is train room for them.” Altogether Herr Krupp’s little toy killed 256 Parisians, and wounded another 620. It would not affect the course of the war, but would certainly harden the peace terms. When the Armistice came, no trace was ever found of the great cannon, though even today pockmarks from the shell can be seen in the austere perpendicular columns of Saint-Gervais, which houses a small commemorative chapel to one of the First World War’s least excusable atrocities.

Suddenly, and at long last, the fortunes of war swung round. By July the offensive power of Ludendorff’s exhausted armies ran out of steam. With a regenerated Foch declaring “Tout le monde à la bataille,” and supported by fresh American troops, the Allied counterstrokes pushed forward all along the line. On 8 August, Haig’s British army inflicted what Ludendorff admitted was “the black day of the German army.” By early autumn the German line had been rolled back, out of France, out of the territory the Germans had held for the past four years—some of it for nearly fifty years.

ARMISTICE

At 11 a.m. on 11 November, all the guns ceased firing. The contrast in mood between the front and the rear in Paris spoke for all the differences that had progressively grown between the two disconnected worlds. “Silent thankfulness” was how a correspondent of The Times described the prevailing sentiment among soldiers up on the line. Further back, “amongst the troops in rest there is more jubilation.” But in Paris carnival reigned. The day had begun cold, misty and gloomy; then the bells started to toll, the celebratory cannon to fire, and with them the dancing—and the crying. As the sun came out, Paris was gripped in a mad whirl of festivity. Civilians and soldiers of all nationalities poured out on to the Concorde, embracing each other, and singing “Madelon! Madelon! Madelon!,” “Tipperary,” “Home, Sweet Home” and a new song recently imported from America, “Over There.” There were rapturous demonstrations in front of the statue to the city of Strasbourg, still draped in black crêpe, and captured German guns were hauled up the Rue de Rivoli. But some of the densest crowds congregated around the Chamber of Deputies, where Clemenceau was expected to speak. There, as the cannon continued to fire outside, the Tiger with the white walrus moustache, architect of victory, rose trembling and declaimed, “Let us pay homage to our great dead, who have given us this victory!” The crowds grew and grew as peasants poured in from the countryside. In a display of inter-Allied amity that would barely see out the signing of the Peace Treaty, an American doughboy, a British Tommy and a French poilu were carried down the grands boulevards on the shoulders of the crowd. As the sunset produced a golden glow, Paris “went charmingly off its head,” recorded a Times correspondent. The climax came that evening as Marthe Chenal of the Opéra Comique, clad in a robe of red, white and blue and a black Alsatian cap, sang the Marseillaise to a wildly jubilant crowd from the steps of the Opéra.

But not everyone was cheering. Women, so many women, were dressed in deep mourning. Proust was lamenting the death of male lovers embodied in the person of “Saint-Loup”; Jean Cocteau the death of his Jean Le Roy; while his friend and colleague Guillaume Apollinaire, who had never entirely recovered from his head wound in 1914, had died of ’flu just two days before the Armistice. Through the happy throngs rattled the hearses, spectres at the feast, bearing away victims of the worst epidemic of ’flu in history. Only in October victims in Paris had been dying at a rate of 350 a day; in the last week of October alone there had been 2,566 such deaths in Paris. Across the globe the deaths from ’flu were to total some forty million—or twice the number of war casualties. When the celebrants of Armistice Day in Paris paused to consider the costs in the grey light of the following day, they counted 1.4 million Frenchmen killed in action, the largest proportion of any of the combatant nations. Adding the civilian and ’flu deaths, France had lost 7 per cent of her population.

The carnival fever of Armistice Day was all too swiftly followed by a certain disillusion. For a long time, la ville lumière remained even darker than London. After all the wartime restrictions, the authorities were slow to get things going again. By the end of November Paris continued to look, and feel, as if she were still at war. Ration cards remained in force, restaurants and cafés closed early; homes and hotels were freezing from the continuing shortage of fuel. On to this scene there began to arrive VIPs and delegates for the forthcoming Peace Conference. There was King George V, and a swarm of American plenipotentiaries. The Hôtel Crillon was found to be too small for their 1,300-strong delegation, so Maxim’s round the corner in the Rue Royale was annexed to it. Herbert Hoover, the food tsar, who was still not yet forty-five, took over a whole block in the Avenue Montaigne; an unsmiling man, all the time he was in Paris he never once visited the theatre and rarely accepted an invitation to dinner. Acidly Jules Cambon, who had been nominated as one of France’s five delegates to the conference and was dislodged from the commandeered Crillon, complained to his brother Paul, the Ambassador to London, that the foreigners were going “to turn Paris into a bawdy-house.”

In sharp contrast to these visiting grandees came a sombre reminder of the suffering of the past four years in the shape of the returning prisoners-of-war, described by a French reporter as “in the majority, no longer men but shadows clothed in torn rags, and so thin!” Their main receiving centre was in the Grand Palais of Exposition renown, which had been requisitioned as a hospital since 1914. The sight of these tattered and broken reminders of the war created in Paris a fresh rage for maximum reparations and indemnities from the defeated Germans.