CHAPTER NINE
UNDER SIEGE
I shall deem it my duty therefore to remain at my post.…
—ELIHU WASHBURNE
I
From the window of the grand salon of his residence on the avenue de l’Impératrice, by the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, the American minister Elihu Washburne looked out on two large, imposing cannon newly positioned close to his front door. Beyond in the fading light, soldiers were cooking their suppers. It was a lovely, clear September evening and, as he wrote in his diary, all was perfectly still except for the occasional distant sound of cannon fire.
There are no carriages passing on the grand avenue, that great artery through which has passed for so many years all the royalty, the wealth, the fashion, the frivolity, the vice of Paris … and there is the silence of death.
“Has the world ever witnessed such change in so short a time,” he wondered. “It to me seems like a dream.”
Paris had become an armed camp. There were soldiers everywhere— encamped all about the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées—more than 300,000, he had been told, regular army troops in red képis and red trousers, reservists of the Garde Mobile and the Garde Nationale, “the People’s Army,” in blue uniforms and armed with whatever was available. Streets and avenues were filled with tents, baggage wagons, horses, and forage. The Tuileries Garden had become an artillery park, the Bois de Boulogne, a vast stockyard for 100,000 sheep and 80,000 head of cattle.
The day before, Sunday, the Germans had cut all roads into the city. At one o’clock Monday afternoon, September 19, 1870, the last train left Paris. The Germans were at the gates and nearly 2 million people, civilians and soldiers, were now trapped.
“And it seems odd to be in this world, and still not in it,” Washburne wrote.
He had become accustomed to constant, almost instantaneous communication with Washington. At the time the new Republic was proclaimed two weeks before, he had sent off one telegram after another reporting the situation as it developed, and Washington had responded at once with telegraphed instructions to recognize the new government without delay—a very different situation from what Richard Rush had experienced in 1848. Now all telegraph lines had been cut.
How another nation could willfully do harm to Paris, the capital city of “light and civilization,” was more than most Parisians could fathom. “It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities,” Victor Hugo had written in a widely circulated appeal to the Germans. “There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and there is a Paris. …” And Paris would not yield to force, Hugo declared: “Paris, pushed to extremities; Paris supported by all France aroused, can conquer, and will conquer; and you will have tried in vain this course of action which already revolts the world.”
Until war broke out that summer, the Paris life for the Washburne family had been entirely to their liking. A French governess for the children had been found and a cordon bleu cook—a Madame Francis and her husband, who served as her assistant—a chambermaid, and a nurse. A French tutor worked with the children every morning but Sunday, and with the children about the house day and night, it seemed more like a home than an official residence.
So relatively small was the “American Colony” in Paris that Washburne had soon become acquainted with many. They came to the house for consultation and advice, and to attend receptions. A few even came to the house to be married, with the American minister often performing the service. Daughter Marie would remember her father’s first secretary, Colonel Wickham Hoffman, saying that if the bride was pretty, the minister kissed her, otherwise it fell to his lot.
Compared to Washburne’s life in Washington and the strain of the Civil War years on the congressman, the assignment to Paris had been “most agreeable.” His wife, Adele, fluent in French, was a great help. He spoke French well enough, but compared to her he “hobbled” in the language, as he said. “Her tact, her grace, her cordial unaffected manner have won her many friends,” he had written proudly to a friend in Illinois.
At the start of summer he had had sufficient free time even to sit for George Healy, who was back in Paris briefly and doing a portrait of Wash-burne’s brother Cadwallader. There was enough similarity, Healy told him, that his cooperation would be of great help, and Washburne had been glad to oblige. Such tranquil days now seemed a world apart.
He had sent Adele and the three youngest children, Susie, Marie, and two-year-old Elihu, Jr., to Brussels for their safety. Of their three older children, Hempstead was in school in the United States, William in school in London. Only the oldest son, twenty-one-year-old Gratiot, had remained with his father.
Troops were now quartered in the house next door. Other houses up the avenue had been left in the care of servants. Washburne’s friend Dr. Evans, having managed the escape of the empress, was still in England, and the other neighbors had “picked up their hats in a hurry,” in Wash-burne’s expression.
Of all the ambassadors of major powers in Paris, he alone had chosen to remain, along with the representatives of Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. All the rest “ran away,” as Washburne put it privately in his diary. (In explanation for his departure, the British diplomat Lord Richard Bickerton Pennell Lyons would write, “I thought it would be, on all accounts, inexpedient for me to allow myself to be shut up in Paris. …”)
Washburne had felt duty-bound to stay and do everything he could for those of his countrymen still there, come what may. Nearly all had wanted to get out but, with business to attend to or other preoccupations, had missed their chance. Charles May and another American named William Reynolds, salesmen for the Remington Arms Company, had simply waited too long. A few, like the medical student Mary Putnam, chose to stay of their own free will. Another was Nathan Sheppard, a lecturer on modern English literature at Chicago University and an acquaintance of Washburne’s, who was trying his hand as a war correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette. For some Americans, like the elderly Moultons of the banking family, Paris had been home for so long they simply could not bring themselves to leave.
Now choice in the matter was no longer anyone’s privilege to make, and Washburne least of all. “However anxious I might be myself to get away, I would deem it a species of cowardice to avail myself of my diplomatic privilege to depart and leave my nationaux behind me to care for themselves.”
He had, besides, just succeeded with the most overwhelming task of his life, and while it had left him totally exhausted, he had learned a great deal and gained immeasurable respect in many quarters at home and in Europe.
Through the panic and confusion of the past several weeks, before the start of the siege, Washburne had not only had the responsibility on his hands for the safe, efficient departure of thousands of Americans, but of some 30,000 Germans who had been ordered to leave the country. Numbers of Germans were being arrested as spies and in some cases convicted and shot.
Some of the German population of Paris had long established businesses and owned property, but the great majority were men and women employed in the most menial kind of labor, as laundresses, street cleaners, and garbage collectors. They were poor and uneducated and with numerous children. As the one remaining representative of a neutral power, Washburne found himself called upon by both the French and Prussian governments to see to the safe exodus of the Germans in the midst of the most tense of days.
“Employers discharged their [German] workmen. Those who would gladly have kept them dared not,” wrote Colonel Hoffman, the first secretary.
The suffering, both moral and physical, was very great. It must be borne in mind that many of these people had been settled for years in Paris. They had married there. Their children had been born there. … We have heard much … of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and of the Huguenots from France, and our sympathies are deeply stirred. … I do not see why the expulsion of the Germans does not rank with these. …
Washburne and his staff at the legation issued safe-conduct passes and arranged for special trains that left from the Gare du Nord every night. Washburne worked twelve to eighteen hours a day, so hard that the rest of the staff felt duty-bound to keep up. As an assistant secretary named Frank Moore wrote, there was “no holding him back” when he decided to do something.
The American Legation occupied a shabby apartment up two flights of winding stairs in a seven-story building at 95 rue de Chaillot, just off the Champs-Élysées. It was a walk of nearly two miles from Wash-burne’s house, up the avenue de l’Impératrice to the Arc de Triomphe, then down the Champs-Élysées, which, door to door, took about half an hour.
His office was anything but impressive, of medium size only and furnished with a single desk, a few chairs, and a black marble mantelpiece on which stood a clock made of the same gloomy material. To add to the overall depressing mood, there was a dark green rug worn nearly black with age.
So great were the crowds waiting at the front door of the legation each morning, and packed inside on the winding stairs, that six gendarmes were needed to keep order. Day after day 500 to 1,000 people stood waiting. Many were old and obviously in no condition to travel. Some had no money. There were women in various stages of pregnancy. One day a child was born on a bench outside near the door.
“I am depressed and sad at the scenes of misery, suffering, and anguish,” Washburne wrote to his wife Adele on September 2.
Yesterday forenoon a poor woman came into the Legation with three children, a babe in arms, one about three and the oldest about five. When about to leave the depot the night before her husband was seized as a … spy—and carried off to prison. There she was left in the depot without a cent of money … and there she remained all night and yesterday made her way to the Legation bringing the children with her. She wept as if her heart would break and the two little children joined in—the baby alone unconscious of the situation. I at once gave her money to go out and get something to eat and sent off a man to look after her husband. …
The crowd to go off last night was so great that I went to the depot myself. There were at least two thousand persons to whom we had given … cards entitling them to tickets, and such was the mob … pulling … squeezing, yelling, and swearing [such as] you never heard. It was impossible for the railroad to send them off and about 500 were left. They broke down the railing and one of my men was nearly squeezed to death. I did not get away from there until midnight.
Not all the Germans had gotten out by the time the city was cut off, but most, more than 20,000, had departed in safety, thanks to numerous French officials and those who ran the railroad, but mainly because of the unstinting efforts of the American minister. As Wickham Hoffman would write, “Everything that energy and kindness of heart could do to facilitate the departure of those poor people, and to mitigate its severity, was done by our minister.
“And here let me remark that no one could have been better fitted for the difficult task. …
Had he been brought up in diplomacy, he would have hesitated and read up on precedents which did not exist, and so let the propitious moment pass. … It is quite as well that the head of an embassy should be a new man. He will attach much less importance to trifles, and act more fearlessly in emergencies.
Elihu Benjamin Washburne, who turned fifty-four that September, was a remarkable man who had served energetically and effectively in Congress for sixteen years but whose appointment as minister to France by President Ulysses S. Grant was regarded in some quarters as woefully inappropriate and he himself quite unsuited for a diplomatic role of almost any kind, let alone one of such prestige and importance as Paris.
Raised on a farm in Maine, he had gotten his start in the law and politics in the rough mining town of Galena, Illinois, and by appearance and manner, he could far more readily have passed for an ordinary countryman than a diplomat. Five feet ten-and-a-half inches tall, he dressed plainly in dark blue or black broadcloth. In a day when nearly every man adorned his face with some variety of beard or mustache, he remained unfashionably clean-shaven. His iron-grey hair, cut long in back, over-hung his shirt collar. He had a high forehead and bushy eyebrows. His large, intense eyes, his most striking feature, were grey-blue. An enthusiastic talker, he spoke in a deep, full voice and seldom left any doubt about what he meant.
He had had no prior diplomatic experience. For all his influence in Congress, he had served on no committee concerned with foreign affairs. Nor had he shown any interest in such matters. That he had none of the easy savoir faire considered requisite for his new role was taken as a further serious drawback. A judgment expressed by The Nation at the time of his appointment was the accepted view of many: “He goes as minister to France, a post for which he may have some qualifications, but what they are it would be difficult to say.”
The New York World had called him “a man of narrow mind” who had “never originated an important measure, never acted a distinguished or influential part on any occasion.” A still more biting dismissal was that of the habitually spiteful Gideon Welles, President Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, who considered Washburne “coarse, uncultivated,” and devoid of “enlarged views.” “He may represent correctly the man who appoints him [Grant], but is no credit to his country.”
“Our family was very, very poor,” Washburne was later to write in his reminiscences. He was the third of the eleven children—seven boys, four girls (one of whom, a boy, died in infancy)—of Israel and Martha Benjamin Washburn. He had been born on September 23, 1816, in the crossroads village of Livermore in Androscoggin County, Maine, on a windy hill far inland from the sea. His father had come north from Massachusetts and bought a sixty-acre farm and the small general store that stood nearby. The front door of the gambrel-roofed house faced toward the western mountains bordering New Hampshire. On clear days one could see Mount Washington more than fifty miles in the distance.
From behind his store counter Israel Washburn talked politics and extended credit in such generous fashion that people came inordinate distances to trade there. When the business failed in 1829, the sheriff arrived with several yoke of oxen and hauled the store away.
The family struggled to survive on the farm, growing potatoes, corn, apples, wheat, and oats. It was exceedingly hard living, with long bitter-cold winters, and unending hard work for everyone. Maine was known as “a devilish place for oats” and just about everything else, so “unwilling” was the rocky soil. It would be said of the Washburn children that they never knew hardship because they never knew anything like luxury. It would also be said of their capacity for hard work that they had never known work that was not hard. In fact, none of them ever forgot the hardships or the example of their parents, and their mother especially, her courage in the face of adversity and her high ambitions for her family. To judge by the subsequent careers of several of her children, she must have been a force.
She had been born in Livermore. Her father, of whom she was notably proud, had served through the entire Revolutionary War, from Lexington to Yorktown. She had had little education and worried that her plain, country ways could be an embarrassment to her children, but, as Elihu wrote, her mind was “quick.” She was an ardent reader of the newspapers that arrived weekly by post rider and, like her husband, took great interest in public affairs. Her pride in their children and how far they could go in life had no limits. “The foundation that is layed in youth lasts throu[gh] life,” she wrote to Elihu after he had headed west. He must remember that “if a man’s word is not good he is good for nothing.”
When I think of her labors [remembered Elihu], her anxieties, her watchfulness, her good and wise counsels and her attention to all our wants, my heart swells with emotions of gratitude toward her which no language can express.
Four of her sons would serve in the United States Congress, elected— and reelected—from four different states, Maine, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. At one point there were three brothers—Israel, Elihu, and Cadwallader—in the House of Representatives at the same time, something that had never happened in the history of the country. Israel, the oldest, later became the governor of Maine. Cadwallader, who came after Elihu in age and was the first of the family to go west, made a fortune in banking, railroads, and especially flour-milling. (As one of the founders of General Mills, he made Gold Medal flour known everywhere.) Later he became a Union general in the Civil War. William, the youngest, who settled in Minnesota, also succeeded handsomely in railroads and milling, and helped found the Minneapolis Tribune, before serving in the United States Senate.
Because there was not food enough for all the mouths to feed on the farm, Elihu was “hired out” as a farmhand by the time he was twelve. “I dug up stumps, drove the oxen to plow and harrow, planted and hoed potatoes,” and he longed the whole while for something “more congenial.” At age fourteen, forced to fend for himself, he left home in a suit made for him by his mother and went to work as an apprentice printer on a newspaper thirty miles away in the town of Gardiner, a job he loved that provided room, board, and the promise of $24 a year. It was then, too, that he decided to add an e to his name, spelling it Washburne, as it had been originally in England.
When the Gardiner newspaper failed, Uncle Reuel Washburn took Elihu into his Livermore law office and taught him Latin.
At eighteen Elihu tried teaching, which he liked even less than farm-work, then started again as a “printer’s devil” at another paper, the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, where he was as happy as he had ever been. “There is no humbug about the trade of a printer,” he would later explain. “A man may be a bogus lawyer, doctor or clergyman, but he cannot set type unless he has learned the art and mastery of printing.”
Between times he got what education he could at public schools and, for a while, at a private seminary in nearby Readfield, having earned enough from haying to pay his board. Reading all he could at public libraries, he acquired a lifelong love of Shakespeare, Dickens, and English poetry. In 1839, after another two years working in a law office in Hallowell, he was admitted to Harvard Law School.
Meanwhile, brother Cadwallader had headed west, and in 1840, at age twenty-three, after little more than a year in law school, Elihu followed. Asked later why her sons left Maine, their mother said no state was big enough to hold any one of her family.
Cadwallader, who had settled for the time in Rock Island, Illinois, persuaded Elihu to try nearby Galena on the Galena River, a tributary of the Mississippi.
He arrived by stern-wheeler on April Fool’s Day, knowing no one, found lodgings in a decrepit log building by a cattle yard, and quickly took hold. The population numbered perhaps 4,000, and the mud in the streets was “knee deep.” But because of the lead mines close by at places with names like Bunkham, Hardscrabble, and Roaring Camp, Galena had become a boomtown, and the people, as Elihu said, were “a litigious set.” In less than a month he was sending money home from his legal fees.
In a rough, wide-open town where other lawyers included drunks and gamblers, he vowed never to smoke or drink hard liquor or gamble, a vow he kept. He joined a church. At home the Washburns were Universal-ists, but with only a few churches to choose from in Galena, he joined the Episcopalians.
He liked the life in what he later called the “Golden Years” in Galena, and his success and stature in the community were to be seen in the handsome Greek Revival house he had built on Third Street. In 1845, at twenty-nine, he married Adele Gratiot, who was ten years younger, small, slender, dark-eyed, well educated, and of French descent. Like Elihu’s mother, she had been born on the frontier, there in Galena. Indeed, she could proudly claim to have been the first white child born in the settlement. Sent to a seminary school in St. Louis, she studied under French nuns and learned French. Thus, Elihu resolved to learn the language, too, and in time French would be spoken within their growing family.
According to an old Washburn family history, “He was not under the influence of anyone except his wife who had much to do with the directing of his career,” and again like his mother, “she never had a doubt that he could do anything which he set out to do.”
Defeated in his first run for Congress in 1848, he tried again in 1852 and won. In little time he became chairman of the House Committee on Commerce. He was praised as “independent,” “intrepid,” “scrupulously honest,” “brimful of things to say and do.” But he could also be abrupt and impatient to the point of rudeness. An Ohio newspaperman watching from the gallery described how Representative Washburne could hardly bear listening to others speak, not even his own brothers, for more than a few minutes before plunging into paperwork at his desk or darting off to talk with someone in the gallery. Or he would tilt back in his seat, hands clasped behind his head, and “blow off like a steam engine.” As chairman of the Committee on Appropriations he was famous for saying no as if it were spelled with two o’s.
He and his brothers took up the antislavery cause and became early enthusiasts for the new Republican Party. (It was Israel Washburn, in a speech in Maine, who reportedly first used the name “Republican” for the party.) As debate over slavery grew more heated in Congress, the brothers played an increasingly prominent part and were in the thick of a long-remembered scene on the floor of the House.
It happened at about two in the morning on February 6, 1858. The House had been in session for hours, arguing over slavery, when two representatives—one from the North and one from the South—suddenly began throwing punches. Others rushed to join the fray, and, as reported, “Mr. Washburne of Illinois was conspicuous among the Republicans dealing heavy blows.” Seeing Representative William Barksdale of Mississippi take a swing at Elihu, brother Cadwallader jumped in and grabbed Barks-dale by the hair of his head, which proved to be a wig that came off in Cadwallader’s hand. The astonishment was enough to stop the fight and set everyone laughing. When Cadwallader returned the wig and Barksdale put it on backward, the merriment grew still greater. Among their constituents back in the Midwest, esteem for both brothers rose appreciably.
At home in Illinois, Elihu had become involved with the political prospects of a former congressman, Abraham Lincoln, whose company he greatly enjoyed. They had first met in 1843. In 1860, when Lincoln ran for president, Washburne wrote a campaign biography for him. On the day Lincoln stepped off the train in Washington, in advance of his inauguration, wearing a makeshift disguise because of a rumored attempt on his life, Washburne alone was at the station to greet him and drive him to his hotel.
Through the grim, painful years of the Civil War, Washburne remained as staunch a supporter of the president as anyone in Congress and, more than any, championed the advancement of Ulysses S. Grant. He had “discovered” Grant earlier, when Grant, having retired from the army and failed successively as a farmer and a real estate agent, came to Galena to work as a clerk in his father’s leather store. As Lincoln himself said, Washburne “always claimed Grant as his right of discovery.”
In long letters to Adele through the war years, Washburne provided a vivid account of people and events in Washington, as well as the realities of the desperate struggle in the field, where, too, he was often on the scene. Of his confidence in Grant there was never a doubt. “Without doing any injustice to anyone, I can say I fully believe this army would have been defeated before this, and in its retreat, had it not been for him,” he wrote to her from Grant’s camp near Spotsylvania, in May of 1864, after some of the fiercest fighting of the war. He was with Grant at Appomattox, saw the final surrender on April 9, 1865, and it was in the library of the Washburne home in Galena in November 1868 that Grant received word that he had been elected president.
The confidence Washburne placed in Grant, Grant returned in kind, appointing Washburne secretary of state, a position from which Washburne withdrew after only a few days. He had been stricken suddenly by what at the time was called a “congestive chill” and remained desperately ill for days. “His life was despaired of,” wrote his daughter Marie, “and I can remember prayers being said for him at our house.” Once recovered, he felt too shaken and exhausted to take on so great a responsibility as secretary of state. He had had his fill of Washington, he decided. When Grant offered the alternative of going to Paris—and with Adele’s full concurrence—he accepted, expecting to enjoy at last a little “quiet and repose.”
Whatever the editorial skepticism about the appointment, or scorn of the kind expressed by Gideon Welles, those who knew Elihu Washburne, including Grant, had every confidence he would prove a great credit to his country.
II
In its long history Paris had been under siege fifteen times before. In the first ordeal, in 53 B.C., the native Parisii on the Île-de-la-Cité had been set upon by the Romans. In the most recent, in 1814, when the combined forces of northern Europe, some 200,000 troops, converged on the city, it held out for just over six months. But Paris had been half the size then, its defenses few compared to those now in place, and most Parisians seemed to feel quite secure, their spirits remaining remarkably high given the circumstances.
The ideal weather continued day after day. Even with soldiers drilling in the streets, Paris seemed much as ever. “The weather is charming and Paris seems wonderfully cheerful,” Washburne wrote to Adele on September 28, the tenth day of the siege. In the interest of keeping communications open with the American minister, Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck was permitting his correspondence to come through the lines by diplomatic pouch.
The formal exchange of dispatches took place every Tuesday morning at a point two miles southwest of Paris at Sèvres, the village on the Seine famous for its china factory. At the sound of trumpets and the raising of a white flag at exactly ten o’clock, a German officer in full dress would march forward to a broken arch on the Sèvres Bridge, give a military salute, and address a French officer who came to meet him, saying, “Gentlemen, I have the honor to present you my salute.”
“Sir, we have the honor to salute you,” came the reply.
“Gentlemen, I have the honor to inform you my mission is to place in your hands Mr. Washburne’s dispatches.”
“Sir, we are going to have the honor to send them.”
Each officer, having again saluted, returned to his end of the bridge and stepped down to the riverbank. The French would then send a boat across the river to receive other dispatches and mail from the hands of the German officer. Again salutes were exchanged. Each officer immediately returned to his respective trenches, and the instant the white flag came down, both sides opened fire again.
Others in Paris had begun trusting their correspondence to “balloon mail.” On September 21, a daring balloonist had taken off from the city and successfully proven that balloons could carry word of what was happening to the outside world. From that point on, the balloons kept flying and became the topic of headline stories and great public interest in the United States. Eventually some sixty-five balloons took flight from Paris carrying more than 2 million pieces of mail. To send dispatches into the city, carrier pigeons were used.
“I have never before so much realized the want of your society and the presence of the darling children,” Washburne wrote to Adele. “But I find enough to do every day to take up my time and so I am not idle.” This, she knew, was a large understatement.
To his brother Israel in Maine, Washburne stressed that the French had 500,000 troops in the city, counting the National Guard, and that their spirits were high, the defenses strong. All approaches to Paris were defended by a wall thirty feet high, a moat, and sixteen fortresses that made up a sixty-mile circle around the city. But there also seemed little likelihood that the French could ever succeed in breaking out through the formidable German lines.
On the morning of September 30, after unusually heavy cannonading, French troops made an all-out sortie against two German positions with what Washburne described as “great courage and spirit,” but against immense odds. Their losses were heavy—500 killed, 1,500 wounded—and nothing was gained.
The morning crowds at the door of the legation had diminished considerably, but the desire of Americans to get out of the city by almost any means was greater than ever and thus far there seemed little Washburne could do to help. In early October the American arms salesman Charles May, thinking he had come up with the perfect solution, asked Washburne to arrange a German passport for him. Washburne said he could not. But when, on the morning of October 7, Léon Gambetta, the French minister of the interior, made a sensational escape from Paris by balloon, the enterprising May and his business associate Reynolds went, too, as Gambetta’s guests in an accompanying balloon.
They took off from the summit of Montmartre, to the cheers of a huge crowd. Gambetta, wrapped in a fur cape and looking extremely pale and apprehensive, waved from the wicker basket swinging beneath a great yellow balloon. The balloon bearing the two Americans was snow-white.
Other Americans in Paris over the years had had a considerable variety of adventures, but until now none had ever escaped by balloon.
It was another perfect day and “a beautiful sight it was to see our friends there, waving hats and handkerchiefs as we gradually ascended,” Charles May would write.
The air was clear and the sky cloudless. A fair even temperature, quite mild, with just enough wind to float us on.
Gambetta’s balloon was just over us a little to the northwest, and soon we were passing the suburbs of Paris near St.-Denis, when I heard the horses galloping below, saw German artillery exercising, and crack, bang went the guns and we realized their eyes were on us, and they meant to bring us down if possible. The firing became more and more frequent, the balls whistled around us, still we kept rising.
One of Gambetta’s crew cupped his hands at his mouth and shouted, “Dépêchez-vous! Dépêchez-vous!” (“Hurry! Hurry!”)
So we opened the sand bag [May continued], which quickened our rising and away we floated, and after twenty minutes the firing ceased and we had the heavens for our way without anything to molest or make us afraid.
“There was no sense of motion, no noise, no friction, no jarring—the perfection of traveling,” May recounted. He had thought to bring a basket of crackers, chocolate, canned oysters, and wine. “So we had a very agreeable time.”
The two balloons were filled with coal gas. It would have taken only a few stray shots to have turned them into balls of flame. As it was, Gambetta eventually landed safely beyond the German lines near Tours, 150 miles to the south. May and Reynolds came down at Roye, 70 miles north of Paris.
The following day it rained for the first time in a month, a “blue dull” rain, as Washburne recorded. It was the twenty-fourth day of the siege, and the problem of food could no longer be ignored. “The days go and the provisions go,” he wrote. The government began rationing meat and set the price. Ration cards were issued. Soldiers stood posted at the boucheries, the butcher shops, to check the cards. Washburne, as he reported to his family, had earlier “laid by” his own sufficient stock of food.
His reputation for energetic, levelheaded attention to problems spread rapidly in Europe and at home. “Were it not for Mr. Washburne, who was brought up in the rough-and-ready life of the Far West, instead of serving an apprenticeship in courts and government offices, those who are still here would be perfectly helpless,” wrote a correspondent for London’s Daily News, Henry Labouchère. “He is worth more than all his colleagues put together.” During an afternoon at the American Legation, Labouchère was amazed to see Washburne walking about “cheerily shaking everyone by the hand, and telling them to make themselves at home.”
How different American diplomats are to the prim old women who represent us abroad, with a staff of a half dozen dandies helping each other to do nothing, who have been taught to regard all who are not of their craft as their natural enemies.
“The world cannot fail to admire the firm purpose which keeps him at his post in the midst of danger,” wrote the Chicago Journal.
In mid-October, Washburne was struck ill by what he called his “old Galena ague,” great dizziness and violent vomiting. Two days later, on October 15, he was still “suffering … so sore I can hardly move … cold feet and ague pains in my limbs …” But he refused to give in. On October 17 he was back at his office “quite early” and “busy all day.”
Many people called. At noon went to the prison [of Saint-Lazare] to see the poor German women. I found seventy-four of them imprisoned for no offense except being Germans. … I have made arrangements to have them all released tomorrow and shall have them cared for till the siege is over.
Pressure on him to get people out of Paris grew greater. Under the new government of Paris, the Government of National Defense, General Louis Trochu was at its head, and Jules Favre served as minister of foreign affairs. Trochu refused to permit anyone to leave the city for any reason for fear of a demoralizing effect on the army.
“But Washburne,” wrote Wickham Hoffman, “was not a man to sit down quietly under a refusal in a matter like this.” He went directly to Trochu’s headquarters at the Louvre and after an “interminable gabble” of three hours, in which Jules Favre also took part, Trochu relented. So on October 27 a caravan of nineteen carriages piled high with baggage departed from the city under military escort carrying forty-eight Americans—men, women, and children—and twenty-one others with passes provided by Minister Washburne.
He had wanted to ride with them as far as the German lines and see them safely delivered, but was suffering “the ague” still and, he had to confess, “a little depression of spirits” from so long a separation from his family. Instead, he sent Hoffman and his son Gratiot.
“We drove to the French outposts, and thence sent forward the flag with an officer of Trochu’s staff,” wrote Hoffman.
While we waited, a German picket of six men advanced toward us, dodging behind the trees, muskets cocked, and fingers on trigger. I confess I was not much impressed with this specimen of German scouting. It looked too much like playing at North American Indian. … The necessary arrangements having been made, we proceeded to the German outposts. Here the Prussian officers verified the list, calling the roll name by name, and taking every precaution to identify the individuals. I heard afterward, however, that a Frenchman of some prominence had escaped disguised as a coachman.
The Americans now remaining in Paris numbered no more than 150.
On October 31, Trochu’s army launched another attack on the Germans, this time at the village of Le Bourget, in an attempt to enlarge the perimeter of Paris. The attack seemed to have succeeded at first and in Paris was immediately proclaimed a resounding victory. But then it turned out to be a horrendous failure.
That same day, to compound the shock of disappointment, came official word that at the French stronghold of Metz, east of Paris, which had been holding out until now, a French army of over 170,000 men had surrendered. To make matters inconceivably worse, rumors spread that at the Hôtel de Ville that morning Trochu and his Government of National Defense were secretly discussing the surrender of Paris.
It was Halloween, and as Washburne wrote in his diary, events “marched with gigantic strides.”
A shouting crowd of workers and citizen soldiers marched on the Hôtel de Ville—angry over any talk of an armistice and determined to save Paris. Washburne was busy all day at the legation, but his friend Nathan Sheppard joined the throngs who converged to see what was happening. “People, and people, and people hurrying to the Hôtel de Ville,” Sheppard wrote, “… ten thousand, fifteen thousand … packing all the vast open space before the palace, and all the streets emptying into it.”
Women with big feet and ankles of prodigious circumference; maidservants in their clean white caps; boys as frolicsome as only boys can be, playing hide-and-seek among the forest of legs, followed by small dogs in full bark; old men, who totter as they hasten. … Mobiles and Nationals in half uniform and full uniform, full-armed and half-armed—in they pour and here they gather, and shout, and squeeze, and sway. …
Placards and banners proclaimed NO ARMISTICE! RESISTANCE TO DEATH! VIVE LA RéPUBLIQUE, VIVE LA COMMUNE.
A tall well-bred-looking gentleman, in officer’s undress uniform, ventures to deplore such factious behavior, and looks down haughtily on the ruffians who hustle up around him with menacing faces and fingers. But he folds his arms and continues to look formidable to his tormentors, who gradually skulk before his cool disdainful eye. …
Delegations wedge their way through to the iron gates [of the Hôtel]. … The clock over the entrance chimes the quarter-hour. The pleasant melody is sadly out of keeping with the angry and vindictive shouts. … The gates come open. The crowd pours in. … There is a parley with the sentinels, who give way. Shots are fired, by whom, at whom, no one knows. … Ten thousand people run hither and thither crying, “To arms! To arms! They are attacking the Government. They are firing on the people.” Now a spectacle of panic, stampede, and lunacy such as only Paris can furnish.
Inside the Hôtel de Ville, the insurgent “Red Paris” seized control of the government. On hearing what was happening, Washburne left the legation and reached the Hôtel de Ville at about six o’clock. Forcing his way through the crowd, he succeeded in getting inside the Hôtel only to find mostly National Guard soldiers wandering about carrying their muskets upside down, the sign of peace. “They all seemed to regard the revolution as an accomplished fact, which was only to be ratified by a vote of the people of Paris.” So Washburne departed, thinking “a genuine Red Republic” was a fait accompli. “God only knows what is yet in store for this unhappy country,” he wrote that night in his diary.
But the uprising melted away as rapidly as it began. By the next day Trochu and the Government of National Defense were back in place. “What a city!” concluded Washburne. “One moment revolution, and the next the most profound calm!”
To add to his troubles, more and more British citizens were descending on him, “perfectly raving” to have learned that through his efforts so many Americans had slipped out of Paris while they were left behind. But by this time Bismarck had informed Washburne there would be no further passports granted to anyone. The exit door was closed.
III
The rumble of distant cannon remained an everyday presence. Wounded soldiers kept arriving at the city’s hospitals and the American Ambulance, a field hospital. There was much talk of holding out at all costs and “dying to the last man”; still, overall the adjustment of the populace remained surprisingly, admirably smooth.
The great majority of the people believed the defenses of the city were impregnable, and in Washburne’s opinion, they had reason to feel secure. He had made several tours of miles of the outer defenses, and was amazed. He had seen many forts and immense earthworks during the Civil War, but these were “a prodigy of strength and wonder,” he recorded. “Indeed, the defenses all round the city present a spectacle without parallel in the whole world.” The entire defense circle was manned by troops of the regular army, and by French sailors who were in charge of the cannon. Washburne could conceive of nothing “so complete.” “I do not see for the life of me, how the city can be taken by assault.”
Though all private building construction had been halted in the city in order to concentrate on defenses, there was no shortage of work. Small shops were busier than ever making war materials. Department stores, theaters, hotels, and public buildings had been turned into hospitals. Flags of the Red Cross flew from the rooftops of the Grand Hôtel, the Comédie Française, the Palais Royal, and the Palais de Justice. Architect Charles Garnier’s still-uncompleted Opera House served as a military supply depot. The Orléans railroad station had been converted into a balloon factory.
At the Louvre, where Trochu established his headquarters, windows were covered with sandbags. Paintings and statuary had been boxed up and carried away for safekeeping. In the great galleries, instead of painters quietly at work at their easels making copies, one saw and heard gunsmiths at workbenches noisily converting old muskets into breechloaders.
In a city cut off from all news from the outside, there were more newspapers being published than ever—thirty-six or more—and representing every shade of political opinion. Hungry for news of almost any kind, Parisians now read newspapers as they walked down the streets. Yet at the same time there seemed even less faith that much of anything published could be trusted for accuracy.
At first all theaters were closed, but when the Comédie Française reopened, with productions using no sets or costumes, a few others followed. Restaurants and cafés remained open, but only until ten at night. Supplies of bread were still plentiful and cheap, but not meat. Reportedly 50,000 horses or more were to be slaughtered before long. Horse-drawn cabs and carriages were growing noticeably fewer in number. But dining on cats and dogs was as yet spoken of only in jest.
Paris continued taking things in stride. Little if any outspoken complaining was to be heard. The crime rate dropped significantly.
For the American population, though they were but a tiny fraction of the total, the hard truth of their lot was little different from the rest. “The situation here is dreadful,” wrote Washburne, summing things up on November 12. “The Prussians can’t get into Paris and the French can’t get out.” Nor did it help that the weather had turned damp and raw. “Nothing of interest today,” he recorded on November 22. “Raining outside—cold, cheerless, dreary …” When he took time off to sit for a portrait, the photographer told him his expression was “too sober.”
“Oh, for an opportunity to escape!” wrote Nathan Sheppard, who to fill the time walked the city at all hours. “One felt an intense desire to have one’s capacity for hearing, seeing, and comprehending increased a hundredfold, to be enabled to be everywhere at once, and to miss not one phase of the situation.” He was annoyed only by the “furtive glances” he encountered, the suspicion of any and all “étrangers” as spies. On the Champs-Élysées one evening, he and two other Americans were arrested on the charge of talking in a foreign tongue.
Worst of all, he wrote, was the mental strain, the ennui:
It is the intolerable tension of expectation and the baffling uncertainty that besets every hour and minute of the day which tries us. One really knows nothing of what is going on, and there is an all-pervading sense of something that is going to happen, and which may come at any moment. This gives a sense of unreality to one’s whole life.
Anything more dreary than the boulevards in the evening would be difficult to imagine, wrote London’s Daily News correspondent Labouchère. Only one streetlamp in three was lighted, and the cafés were on half-allowances of gas.
For many not the least of troubles was severe insomnia. An American physician from Pennsylvania named Robert Sibbet, who had come to Paris expecting to attend lectures at the École de Médecine just as the École closed its doors in the emergency, found himself “overtaken” with insomnia and reported many others suffering in the same way. The worst of it was the cannonading. “The cannonading produces a decided effect upon nervous constitutions.” Many nights he could not sleep at all, not even for an hour.
The American medical student Mary Putnam had the advantage, she said, of something to do of overriding importance to her. She concentrated on her academic work, and on tending the sick and wounded at the Hôpital de la Pitié. The steadily diminishing supply of food, the inconveniences, bothered her comparatively little. Nor had she any desire to leave.
She was staying with a French family whose congenial, cultivated company and outlook she greatly enjoyed. Her only pain she seems to have kept to herself. She had fallen in love with another medical student, a young Frenchman, and they had become engaged. But he had gone to the front to serve. She refused to brood or complain. She had set herself to completing her thesis by the end of the year. Her chosen topic was “De la Graisse Neutre et des Acides Gras” (“Natural Fat and Fatty Acids”). It was the last hurdle to her becoming the first American woman to be graduated from the École de Médecine.
“It is not at all probable that the war will last until December,” she had written to her mother on the eve of the siege, “and if school opens then I have all I need.” She had offered her services to the doctors at the American Ambulance, but was told they had more volunteers than they had places for.
With the passage of days the toll of disease—and especially of smallpox—mounted steadily. In the first week of the siege 158 people died of smallpox. By the fourth week the number exceeded 200. By the eighth week, 419 would die of the disease.
After nearly two months of siege, the gas that made Paris the City of Light finally gave out, along with food and firewood. An order appeared that instead of only one in three streetlamps lighted at night, it would now be one in six.
As darkness fell earlier and more heavily, Washburne found himself thinking increasingly of life at home in Galena and such examples of fortitude as he had grown up with in the Maine of his boyhood. On November 18 he noted in his diary that it was his father’s eighty-sixth birthday, and that it would not be long before his father and the last of the settlers of Livermore were all gone.
And what a class of men they were [he wrote], distinguished for intelligence, nobility, honor, thrift, illustrating their lives by all these virtues which belong to the best type of the New England character. … And here in this far off, besieged city, in these long and dismal days, I think of them all. …
To Parisians it came as no surprise that they would still, in the face of everything and in large numbers, turn out for a Sunday stroll on the boulevards, quite as though they had not a care, and especially if the sun were shining, as it was on Sunday, November 20. “The sun was just warm enough for comfort,” Nathan Sheppard noted. “The atmosphere was kindly.” He saw nothing dejected in the look of the crowd. “On the contrary, nothing could be more indicative of the satisfaction and contentment than the faces of the people under the genial November sun. They were each and every one the picture of self-congratulation.” Shoes were polished, children “sportive.” At one of the public concerts, a young lady who had performed beamed when she received, instead of a bouquet of flowers, a generous portion of cheese.
In the meantime, the cattle and sheep that had filled the Bois de Boulogne were to be seen no more. Horsemeat had become the mainstay of Paris. And all knew there was worse to come. “They are arriving down to what we call in the Galena mines the hard pan,” Washburne wrote, referring to the part all but impossible to drill.
Because the German command continued to grant him the privilege of receiving by diplomatic pouch news from the outside world, he was in a position like that of no one else. No newspapers from elsewhere got into Paris except those that came to the American Legation. But he could also send out written correspondence and so felt he must report what he knew as responsibly and accurately as possible. When time allowed, he tried to get out and see all he could of what was happening, hoping in this way that he might be better able to forecast what was to come. But could anyone predict how Paris would respond under such circumstances? There seemed no telling with the French. So much that they did seemed such a contradiction. “With an improvised city government, without police, without organization,” he recorded in the last week of November, “Paris has never been so tranquil and never has there been so little crime. …”
The radical political clubs had begun to “agitate” again. “Hunger and cold will do their work,” he wrote. But whatever the given situation, he reported to Washington, no one could tell how soon it might all change.
The American Ambulance, the large, well-equipped field hospital established by Thomas Evans and others at the start of the war, had proven a tremendous success and a source of pride for every American who knew anything about it. At its head were two American physicians, Dr. John Swinburne, the chief surgeon, and Dr. W. E. Johnston, the physician-in-chief, assisted by several additional American doctors and nearly forty American volunteers, including Gratiot Washburne.
Of the many hospitals and ambulances throughout the city, it was the only tent encampment, intended specifically to provide as much fresh air as possible. “Here were order, system, and discipline,” wrote Wickham Hoffman. The work went on without stop in all weather.
To warm the large tents in cold weather a trench had been dug the length of each on the inside and a pipe laid to carry heat from a coal stove set in a hole at one end of the tent on the outside. Thus the ground was dried and warmed, and this warmed the whole tent. It was a solution devised during the Civil War and it worked perfectly. No patient in the American Ambulance was to suffer from the cold. “I have known the thermometer outside to be 20 degrees Fahrenheit, while in the tents it stood at 55 degrees,” wrote Hoffman.
Swinburne, a battlefield surgeon in the Civil War, had been traveling in France when the Franco-Prussian War broke out and had stayed in Paris to serve. He spoke perfect French, seemed never to sleep, and was admired by everybody. He and Dr. Johnston both served without remuneration.
“Is it necessary that we should dwell upon the scrupulous cleanliness of this ambulance, or the assiduous care [with] which our wounded are treated?” asked an editorial in the Électeur Libre, adding that it was “truly touching” to see these foreigners “giving themselves up without reserve to this humane work.” The surgeon general of the French Army told Elihu Washburne he thought the American hospital superior to anything the French had.
On December 1, following yet another futile French assault launched on the German lines, Washburne stood in the cold of the afternoon watching as the wounded, numbering more than a hundred, were hauled to the tents of the ambulance by the carriage load. Gratiot had been with the volunteers who went to the battlefield to help. One soldier had died in Gratiot’s arms.
The cold of winter had arrived, and Washburne continued to chronicle in his diary the steady worsening of conditions and decline of hope. Numbering the days of the siege, he filled page after page, writing in a clear, straightforward hand, leaving little margin on either side and rarely ever crossing out or changing a word.
December 2. 76th day of the siege. Cold … ice made last night half an inch thick.
December 3. 77th day of the siege. … There has been no fighting at all anywhere today. There was a very light snow last night and this evening it rains a little. The suffering of the troops on both sides must have been fearful these last days. The French are without blankets and with but little to eat, half-frozen, half-starved, and raw troops at that. … I have just come from the American Ambulance where I saw a poor captain of the regular army breathing his last and his last moments were being soothed by some of our American ladies who are devoting themselves to the sick and dying.
December 4. 78th day of the siege. A snapping cold morning. … Have remained in my room nearly all day hugging my fire closely. This evening went to Mr. Moulton’s with Gratiot as usual … on Sunday evening. Nothing talked of or thought of but the … siege and the absent ones and our “bright and happy homes so far away. …”
December 6. 80th day of the siege. … Another sortie threatened which only means more butchery. The more we hear of the battles of last week, the more bloody they seem to have been. The French have lost most frightfully and particularly in officers. They have shown a courage bordering on desperation.
December 8. 82nd day of the siege. … A more doleful day than this has not yet been invented. …
December 11. 85th day of the siege. My cold worse than ever and I am unable to go out. … People come in and say the day is horrible outside. For the first time there is [talk] about the supply of bread getting short. …
December 15. 89th day of the siege. … Went to the Legation this P.M. at two o’clock. The ante room was filled with poor German women asking aid. I am now giving succor to more than six hundred women and children. …
As he explained in a letter to one of his brothers at home, money for support of the refugees on his hands came from the German government, but the time was fast approaching when money would buy neither food nor firewood.
In ten days there had not been ten minutes of sunshine. It had become one of the coldest winters anyone could remember. The Prussian command began threatening Paris with bombardment, but the people showed no sign of panic. There was still no discernible lessening of spirit.
In the United States, sympathy and admiration for the people of Paris could be heard everywhere. “Too much cannot be said in praise of the conduct of the population of Paris in these days of suffering and privation,” wrote a correspondent for the New York Times.
Never did any population under similar circumstances exhibit greater patience, resignation and heroism. The Prussians imagine that when they begin their threatened bombardment, those qualities will fail them. They are mistaken. The people of the capital know well what is before them, and are prepared for everything.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish did what he could to boost Washburne’s spirits, assuring him his efforts were not going unappreciated. “There is universal approbation for your course from Americans,” he wrote. “Nothing has been omitted [by you] that ought to have been done and what has been done, has been done well. I think you have earned the title ‘Protector General.’ ”
All over the city, long lines, mostly of women, stood in the bitter cold outside butcher shops and bakeries, lines of a thousand people in some cases. Lines formed as early as four in the morning and the waiting could last five or six hours, only to buy nothing more appetizing than horses’ hooves and horrible dirt-colored bread. On the rue de Clichy a jeweler now displayed eggs wrapped in cotton in the part of his window usually reserved for fine silver.
As firewood began running out, bands of thousands of people roved the streets at night to cut down trees and rip apart wooden fences for fuel. Many poor families were burning their furniture to keep warm.
Christmas Day was the coldest day yet, “the climax of the forlorn,” Nathan Sheppard called it. “Thermometer at zero, snow dribbling, scowling heavens, slippery pavements, ominous silence all round … thousands of people lying abed to save food and fuel.”
“Never has a sadder Christmas dawned on any city,” wrote Washburne. “The sufferings … exceed by far anything we have seen.” Of so much that was horrible, the continuing slaughter of horses seems to have distressed him particularly.
The government is seizing every horse it can lay its hands on for food. It carries out its work with remorseless impartiality. The omnibus horse, the cab horse, the work horse, the fancy horse, all go alike in mournful procession to the butcher’s block. …
For his part, determined not to let Christmas go by unrecognized, he sacrificed two laying hens for a Christmas dinner at home for Wick-ham Hoffman, Dr. Johnston, Nathan Sheppard, and a few other American friends, in addition to Gratiot. The bill-of-fare included oyster soup, followed by sardines, roast chicken, corned beef and potatoes, tomatoes, cranberries, green corn, and green peas—all but the chicken from Washburne’s supply of canned goods.
As Hoffman was to explain, the French were accustomed to shopping for fresh food day-to-day, not only because of their love of fresh food, but because so many lived in apartments with little if any room for stores. Americans liked being well stocked with canned goods, and consequently many Paris grocers had obligingly imported large quantities for the colonie américaine. With the greater part of the colonie having departed by the time the siege began, a quantity of canned fruits, vegetables, oysters, even lobsters, had remained on the market. “The French knew nothing of these eatables till late in the siege, when they discovered their merits,” Hoffman wrote. “In the meantime the Americans bought up nearly all there was at hand.”
For dessert Washburne offered a selection of canned fruits, in addition to chocolates, of which there was still no shortage in Paris. Indeed, supplies of French chocolate, mustard, and wine appeared to be inexhaustible.
The day after Christmas, he recorded a stark winter scene he had never thought imaginable—a “wood riot” virtually at his front door.
The large square across the street diagonally from our house was filled with wood from the Bois de Boulogne, which has been saved up to burn into charcoal. At about one o’clock this P.M. a crowd of two or three thousand women and children gathered … right in our neighborhood and “went for” this wood. … Nearly all the wood was carried off.
It was probably only the beginning, he speculated. “These people cannot freeze to death or starve to death.”
Two days later, on December 28, he hit a new low, despairing over everything, including himself. “The situation becomes more and more critical … I am becoming utterly demoralized.”
I am unfitted for anything. This siege life is becoming unendurable. I have no disposition to read anything. … I am too lazy to do any work and it is an immense effort to write a dispatch once a week. …
By New Year’s Day, Paris was both freezing and starving to death. People were eating anything to be had—mule meat, dogs, cats, crows, sparrows, rats, and bread that was nearly black and as heavy, Washburne said, as the lead from a Galena mine. To Nathan Sheppard it tasted of “sawdust, mud, and potato skins.”
Sheppard sampled just about everything, and out of necessity, it seems, as much as curiosity. He found dogmeat preferable to horsemeat, but could not honestly say he liked it. Cats he considered “downright good eating,” as apparently did many people. The price of a cat on the market was four times that of dog. For the poor, nothing was a bargain. By the second half of December a single egg was 3 francs, twice the daily pay of a soldier in the National Guard. A single sparrow cost 1 franc. For weeks along the Champs-Élysées and in the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens, and on the quays by the Seine, people had been busy shooting sparrows, to the point that some felt it dangerous to be out walking there.
A rat cost only a little less than a sparrow. A rat, Sheppard was surprised to find, tasted a lot like a bird. It had been estimated that at the start of the siege the number of rats in Paris exceeded 20,000. It was also generally agreed that the flavor of a brewery rat surpassed that of the sewer rat, due to its diet. Rat pâté was considered a delicacy, but Sheppard knew of only one shop that carried it.
Food had become the principal topic of conversation. “The worst of it is,” he wrote, “the more one talks about eating, the more one wants to eat.” Many Parisians, with their abiding affection for dogs, were keeping them hidden. One elderly woman assured him she would sooner starve to death than eat her cat.
With little or nothing to feed the animals in the zoo, the government began butchering them as well, until nearly all had gone to feed the starving city—bear, kangaroo, reindeer, camel, yak, even porcupine, and two long-popular elephants named Castor and Pollux.
But as bad as things became, there was no time when money— preferably gold—would not buy good food (a point vividly made by Honoré Daumier in a caricature of a fat, well-heeled epicure, a great bib at his neck, happily gorging himself). Nor did anyone in Paris doubt that across the lines the enemy’s army had all it wanted in the way of bread and German sausage.
Everyone dreamed of white bread, café au lait, and green vegetables, wrote Mary Putnam. “But bah!!! Such things are not worth speaking about.”
“The incessant and exceptional cold weather continues, and the suffering in the city is steadily increasing,” Washburne stressed in a dispatch to the secretary of state in the first week of January, doubtless wondering whether anyone enjoying the comforts of Washington had the least idea of the agony of Paris, and of the army as well as the people. Several hundred French soldiers had been disabled by the extreme cold or had frozen to death.
So severe was the suffering of the indigent Germans who still came to him in desperation, pleading for his help, that Washburne had converted the whole first floor of the legation building into a dormitory where he housed, fed, and kept warm more than a hundred men, women, and children.
The poor suffered the most. The death toll in the city, not counting those dying in the military hospitals, had reached more than 4,000 a week, five times the usual average, and the heaviest toll was among infants and the elderly poor. “Great discontent is now prevailing among the poorer classes, yet there seems to be a disposition to hold out until the last extremity,” wrote Washburne.
IV
With the ground frozen as hard as marble to a depth of a foot and a half, the Prussians were able to bring up the biggest of their Krupp cannon, and on January 5, 1871, the 109th day of the siege, they commenced bombardment of Paris itself. Many had predicted it would never happen, that Bismarck would not allow it. In fact, Bismarck had wanted to begin bombarding the city as early as October, convinced that “two or three shells” would be enough to scare the Parisians into surrendering.
“At 2 P.M. I walked down the Champs-Élysées,” wrote Washburne, “and to say that the firing was then terrific would give no idea of it. I supposed, however, it was only a bombardment of the forts and I had not thought that the shells were coming into the city.”
The initial barrage struck on the Left Bank, the first shell on the rue Lalande. Olin Warner, who had not gone off to fight with the French army as he originally intended, but stayed on living on the Left Bank, wrote of German shells hitting “on all sides” all night in his neighborhood. “Sometimes they would strike and burst so near I could smell the powder from the explosion and once I heard a woman scream. …”
The thundering assault on the Left Bank continued day and night. An old woman had her head blown off. Near the Luxembourg Gardens a little girl was cut in two on her way to school. An American student from Louisville, Kentucky, named Charles Swager had part of one foot torn to pieces when a shell struck his room on the Left Bank. Taken to the American Ambulance, he had to have his leg amputated. The operation was performed by doctors Swinburne and Johnston, as Washburne duly noted, but a month later the young man would die.
The poor were especially to be pitied, wrote the American doctor Robert Sibbet.
They carry with them, through the deep snow which has fallen, their children and their bedding. They are crowding into the basement stories of the theaters, the churches and other buildings, where they are safe from the cold and the shells.
With shells bursting all around the house where she lived on the Left Bank, Mary Putnam had to move out. One night, with four or five hundred others, she slept in the vast crypt beneath the Panthéon, where the heroes of French liberty were buried. “It was singularly dramatic,” she wrote, “the tombs of Voltaire and Rousseau sheltering the victims of the Prussian barbarians. …”
The bombardment continued with great fury. The shells rained down at a rate of three or four hundred a day, all striking the Left Bank. (The domes of the Panthéon and the Invalides remained favorite German targets.) But the number of people killed was surprisingly low, given the size of the city’s population. “Nearly twelve days of furious bombardment has accomplished but little,” Washburne wrote on January 16. “The killing and wounding of a few men, women, and children and the knocking to pieces of a few hundred houses in a city of two millions is no great progress. …” “The bombardment so far,” he reported to Secretary of State Fish that same day, “has not had the effect of hastening the surrender of the city. On the other hand it has apparently made the people more firm and determined.”
The total number of those killed by the bombardment would be estimated to have been 97 over three weeks, or less than a third of the number dying of smallpox in the hospitals each week, week after week.
In the privacy of his diary, on January 18, Washburne wrote, “I am more and more convinced that we can only be taken by starvation.” The weight of despair had never been worse. “Four months of siege today and where has all this gone to? It seems to me as if I had been buried alive. I have accomplished nothing and, separated from my family and friends, cut off from communication to a great extent from the outside world, those dreary weeks might as well be struck off my existence.”
A great movement of some 100,000 troops was under way. The Paris National Guard, with little or no experience in fighting, was to launch a last, desperate sortie to the west of the city. “The ambulances have all been notified, and I shudder for the forthcoming horrors.” Some of the units had had only a few days of training.
The French novelist Edmond de Goncourt wrote of the “grandiose, soul-stirring sight” of the citizen 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.
The following day, as the battle raged near Saint-Cloud, Washburne and Wickham Hoffman went as far as Passy, to the historic old Château de la Muette, to observe with Jules Favre and other French officials as much as could be seen by telescope from an uppermost cupola.
One hundred thousand men are struggling to break through that circle of iron and of fire which has held them for four long, long months [Washburne wrote]. The lay of the country is such that we cannot see the theater of the conflict. … The low muttering of the distant cannon, and the rising of the smoke indicate, however, the field of carnage. The crowd of Frenchmen in the cupola were sad indeed, and we could not help feel for their anxiety.
From the château, Washburne returned to the American Ambulance, where carriages from the battlefield were arriving one after another with “loads of mutilated victims.”
They had brought in sixty-five of the wounded. … The assistants were removing their clothes all wet and clotted with blood, and surgeons were binding up their ghastly wounds.
Dr. Johnston and Gratiot told him the slaughter of French troops had been horrible, that the “whole country was literally covered with dead and wounded.”
“All Paris is on the qui-vive and the wildest reports are circulating,” he wrote by day’s end. “The streets are full of people, men, women, and children. Who will undertake to measure the agonies of this dreadful hour!”
The weather turned thick and foggy. Rumors spread of “trouble in the city” and of Trochu being “crazy as a bed bug.” On the morning of Sunday, January 22, the pounding of the bombardment seemed heavier than ever.
That afternoon some of the National Guard and an angry mob marched on the Hôtel de Ville once again but were confronted by troops of the Mobile Guard, who fired on them, killing five and wounding a dozen more. “And then such a scatteration,” wrote Washburne, “these wretches flying in every direction … and in twenty minutes it was all ended.” But for the first time French troops had fired on their fellow Frenchmen.
Again he and Hoffman had made their way down the Champs-Élysées in an effort to see what was happening, but to no avail, so dense were the crowds and the numbers of troops drawn up.
“ ‘Mischief afoot,’ ” Washburne surmised in his diary that night, evoking a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “The first blood has been shed and no person can tell what [a] half starved … Parisian population will do.”
Four days of continuing fog, rumors, and bombardment followed. He had never seen such gloom everywhere, he wrote on January 24. Hardly anyone was to be seen except those cutting down the great trees along the avenues. “The city is on its last legs. …”
And then it happened. The surrender of Paris—and the end of the war—was announced on the morning of Friday, January 27, 1871, the 131st day of the siege.
“ ‘Hail mighty day!’ ” wrote Washburne. “Not a gun is heard today, the most profound quiet reigns. …”