Chapter Twenty Four.
The Days of Reprisal.
The day which marked the fall of the Vendôme Column heralded the coming of the end, the termination of the short-lived triumph of the Commune. For the party of safety was fully awake now to the necessity of saving France from what threatened to prove a perhaps more bloody repetition of the Revolution of 1793. MacMahon’s commands came sharp and to the point, and every week made the position of the Communists so desperate, that it seemed as if in feline rage they had determined to die fighting, marking their end with every mischievous piece of destruction they could effect. Hence it was that not only was fire set to buildings, but the destruction was rendered more furious by the application of mineral oils. Civilisation shuddered as reports were sent in of the work of the petroleuses, which seemed to indicate that the fairest city of the world was doomed to become a heap of ashes. In these latter days Henty writes that “never since the days of Saint Bartholomew has Paris passed through such a terrible twenty-four hours as those which I spent there. I question if even that famous massacre was more terrible. I do not remember the number of victims which history records to have fallen then, but since the troops entered Paris seven or eight thousand of the Communists were estimated to have been shot, and to this slaughter must be added the horrors of the conflagration. To make a comparison, it was a mingling of the great Protestant massacre and the burning of Rome. The smoke of the blazing city, after hanging like a pall, as if to hide the horrors, drifted slowly away, and flakes of incandescent paper, which fluttered down in the suburbs as thick as snow, were some of them carried a distance of fifty miles away. At this time it was apparently lawful for anyone to shoot his neighbour. An unguarded word, a movement which an excited man might consider suspicious, and a cry was raised, ‘A Communist!’ The voice of the accused was drowned in the tumult, and the unfortunate man was lucky if he was not at once held up and shot by the first armed men who came upon the scene. Innocent and guilty alike fell victims; and, as instancing the risk of strangers being about, two of our English officers, not being in uniform, had got as far as the Louvre just as the troops were about to advance against the Hôtel de ville. They were at once seized and questioned. The answer was: ‘We are English officers. We have our papers to prove our position.’ The reply to this was: ‘Messieurs, we have no time to examine papers now. Fall in behind, and if you attempt to escape you will be shot.’ There was nothing for it but to obey. The regiment went off at the double; the officers followed. Another regiment seeing these two officers in mufti running behind the troops, at once seized them. Question and explanation were again postponed, for there was no time to talk. ‘Put these fellows in front,’ said an officer; and this time in front of the troops they went forward under a tremendous fire, until, the insurgents falling back, there was time to inspect papers. This is the sort of thing,” Henty concludes naïvely, “to which one was every moment exposed in Paris. I can assure you that a special correspondent’s duties were no sinecure.”
For the fighting in Paris was now going on more fiercely than ever. Grape-shot and shell from the batteries of field-pieces, from the various barricades and the forts engaged, worked dire havoc, and just at this time in particular, Henty relates the fact that from nearly every house and almost every window in the better streets hung the gay tricolour flag, in proof that the occupants were anti-Communists, and opposed to the red. In the boulevards and elsewhere the openings, whether gratings or windows, were all covered up with heaps of wet sand or mud, or by tightly-fitting boards. This precaution was taken on account of the fiendish women belonging to the Commune, who were going about pouring petroleum into the cellars and then throwing down lighted matches. On one day alone, marked by fresh fires constantly breaking out, Henty saw lying on the pavement the bodies of two women, who had just been taken in their deadly pursuit and shot. Six more were lying close to the ruins of the Palais Royal. The death sentence had been promulgated by MacMahon, not only for the protection of the city, but of the lives of the troops as well, for the Communists were desperate, and again and again wires laid for communication with mines were torn up; this saved the principal buildings. Despite all the horrors of destruction and the retribution that followed, it was necessary for orders to be issued as to the early closing of public buildings. Something had to be done to put an end to the sight-seeing of the people who were prowling about, eager to get a glimpse of a stray corpse or a pool of blood, or to follow the troops leading off a prisoner, man or woman, to be shot; any sensation, no matter how terrible, was followed up with the same eagerness with which at home in England people would hurry to a race meeting or to some royal event.
That monstrous cataclysm, the Commune, was in its last throes, though dying hard. Its lurid sun was setting in blood. Retribution was falling heavily and sensational reports were in the air. One of the Parisian papers that had shown a ghoul-like thirst for blood, and had exhibited the desire further to inflame the fury of the victorious party, asserted that a hundred and fifty firemen had been shot at Versailles on the date previous to its appearance. This, on authority which Henty considered unimpeachable, was utterly false, for there had been no summary executions there. Soon after, as a special correspondent, he had to read a communication addressed by a Frenchman to one of our English papers, charging his colleagues with exaggerating their accounts of the wholesale and summary executions which they witnessed, and with feeling undue compassion for the men, women, and children thus butchered. In reply to this Henty says: “No correspondent that I am aware of has ever regarded as other than inevitable the fury of the troops whose duty it was to avenge the burning of the Tuileries and the murder of the hostages. That they would give no quarter was what everyone supposed. Such deeds done in hot blood, horrible as they may be to witness, are common incidents in warfare, and though the correspondents might regret to find a regular army so entirely beyond control, they would hardly be surprised. But that which the correspondents saw with feelings of horror and disgust was people arrested on a mere hue and cry of their being insurgents or having thrown petroleum, and then dragged away amidst showers of blows from the ruffianly middle-class mob that had tamely put up with the Commune, and shot down like dogs. To make my meaning clear, I will give you a couple of instances. At the corner of one street there was a barricade. The insurgents had run away when the troops came up and carried it. It was not until the following morning that the neighbouring houses were searched for fugitives. Six men, and a boy in the uniform of the National Guard, were found. The men pleaded piteously for their lives; the boy, who had retained his musket, resisted to the last, and wounded two men before he was disarmed. Then all the seven were put up against the barricade and shot. This is bad, but it is not what my colleagues or myself mean by atrocious reprisals. But what will the French writer of the letter to the English press say to this. At a house in the Faubourg Saint Germain there was a native of Chaillot, who fled thither with his family to escape being forcibly incorporated in the troops of the Commune. He had belonged to the National Guard during the first siege, and had retained the képi which most Frenchmen then wore. The troops searched the house, dragged the man down into the street, and without listening to a word of explanation blew out his brains. In the wholesale razzias that were made, prisoners overcome with fear and falling down from utter nervous exhaustion were dragged out, shot, and left lying in the road. As regards the women supposed to be going about with bottles of petroleum to set houses on fire, all I can say is that I have seen what has made me understand the old cry of ‘A witch! a witch!’ with us. Any ugly old crone, who might be mingling with the crowd, was liable to instant execution, and many were thus butchered. I will only add that so far as I have seen, the correspondents of the English press have rather underrated than overstated what took place, and so far as I am concerned, I have never reported what I did not see myself, and have even carried my scruples so far as not to mention the wholesale butcheries of which a well-known general was guilty, and from which a former officer in our artillery was rescued by something little short of a miracle. As for the troops, they did not, that I ever saw, exhibit any ferocity. They left that to the cowardly curs who were crying ‘Vive la Commune!’ the very day before the Versaillais came in. Had all the insurgents been put to death, I should not say a word. Such atrocities are part of the business of war. But what I do say is, that thousands have been sacrificed without their executioners taking the trouble to ascertain their identity. The clamour of the mob was considered to be sufficient proof of guilt.”
Henty was very reticent about a good many of his adventures in Paris and just outside the Ville Lumière during those days streaked with political trouble and dire calamity which followed the close of the war. He looked on at the Commune just as a soldier thoroughly accustomed to horrida bella might, and what is more, he saw through its egotism and hollow pretence, and criticised its opéra bouffe absurdities and its crimes. When the Commune was at its height, however, he got out of Paris and set out to join the investing Versaillais. From the vantage point of Meudon he and one or two other correspondents used to watch the firing of the Communists, and came to entertain a very poor opinion of it, except from a spectacular point of view. To the uninitiated, shell-firing seems a form of warfare of the most deadly kind; but that is where the mistake comes in, for, as Henty says, “in no case is artillery fire really dangerous except at point-blank range.” With elevation, a shell, to do great damage, must “drop straight on top of you.” Then, of course, the effect is bad; otherwise there is a good deal of sound and fury signifying the vagaries of shells, and with a properly constituted “obus” the looker-on has time to decide, as he watches the firing, which way he had better go to avoid any unpleasant consequences. Henty seems to have rather enjoyed the sensation, as a matter of fact, and he pricks the bubble—of the cannon’s mouth, as it were—by destroying a popular delusion as to the awful results bound to follow from heavy shell-fire. To read what he says, one is driven to the conclusion that the projectiles in question have been masquerading as far more dangerous than is really the case, in the same way as the Russian has built up a bogus reputation for fearsomeness on the strength of the big boots he wears. “Why, in the Turco-Servian War,” Henty writes, “I was with some four thousand men on a knoll twice the size of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Into that space the enemy dropped three thousand shells in eight hours, and killed three or four men!” One chance in a thousand was fairly small.
But to return to that charming spot, Meudon, at the time when it was residentially risky. What is the sensation like of being under fire? Henty, of course, was fortunately constituted, and did not mind little things. “At first,” he says, “you are too flustered to be really afraid, and when you get used to that you’ve got your business to think about. You’re there for a purpose, you must remember. Besides, use enables one to estimate danger very quickly, and often that estimate reveals the fact that there is no danger at all.”
He gives a vividly interesting, and yet a matter-of-fact impression of watching shell-firing. “When the flash showed at the far-off battery, one listened for the missile—that horrible whistle, growing louder and louder as the shell travelled towards one. Until it was about thirty yards away it was impossible to tell whether it was coming within dangerous proximity or not. Thirty yards off, the sound altered if it was moving at an angle that would carry it out of range. If the sound didn’t alter, one fell flat on one’s face; if it did, one stood still. A matter of nerve, perhaps, but nerve backed up by knowledge.” Familiarity, of course, produces an easier way of looking at such things, but viewed in this way the ordinary everyday idea of artillery fire has to be considerably altered. Henty’s observations might well be incorporated in some little manual on etiquette when meeting shells.