It had been agreed between Mr. Washburne and myself that if the diplomatic corps left Paris, and he accompanied them, I should remain to take charge of the Legation, and look after American and German property; and he so reported to Mr. Fish. I had quite a curiosity to be a besieged. I had been a besieger at Port Hudson, and thought that I would like to experience the other sensation. The sensation is not an unpleasant one, especially in a city like Paris. If you have been overworked and harassed, the relief is very great. There is a calm, a sort of Sunday rest, about it that is quite delightful. In my experience the life of the besieged is altogether the most comfortable of the two. You live quietly in your own house, and with your own servants; and with a little forethought you may be amply provisioned. You sleep in your own room, instead of in a cold, damp, and muddy tent; and if an éclat d'obus—as the French delicately call it—strikes your house on one side, you move into the other. There has been a great deal of fine writing about famous sieges, and the suffering and heroism of the inhabitants. I imagine that there was not so much suffering, after all, at Saragossa; and that the "Maid" and her companions in arms had plenty of corn-meal and good mule-meat to eat—not a disagreeable or unwholesome diet for a while!
[CHAPTER XV.]
Balloons.—Large Number dispatched.—Small Number lost.—Worth.—Carrier-pigeons.—Their Failure.—Their Instincts.—Times "Agony Column."—Correspondence.—Letters to Besieged.—Count Solms.—Our Dispatch-bag.—Moltke complains that it is abused.—Washburne's Answer.—Bismarck's Reply.
At the beginning of the siege, one of the absorbing topics of discussion among the Parisians was the means of communication with the outer world. The French had always had a fancy for ballooning, and were probably in advance of the rest of the world in this respect. They now applied their experience to a practical use, and soon a service of mail balloons was organized, starting from Paris twice a week. At first they were dispatched in the afternoon, for the all-sufficient reason that they always had been dispatched in the afternoon; but soon they found that the balloon did not rise quickly enough to escape the bullets of the Prussians encamped upon the hills which surround Paris. So they changed the hour of departure to one in the morning. When daylight appeared they were beyond the Prussian lines. Indeed, the speed of the balloon is sometimes marvelous. Starting at one o'clock in the morning, one of them fell into the sea off the coast of Holland at daylight. The passengers were rescued by a fishing-smack. A second descended in Norway on the very morning it left Paris. The officer of the Post-office who was charged with the organization of this service told me that, of ninety-seven balloons that left Paris during the siege, ninety-four arrived safely; about equal to railway-trains in these latter days. Two fell into the hands of the enemy, and one was never heard of. It was supposed to have drifted out to sea and been lost. A balloon was seen off Eddystone Light-house. A few days afterward a gentleman spending the winter at Torquay received a letter from the rector at Land's End, Cornwall, stating that a number of letters had drifted ashore, supposed to have been lost from a balloon, and among them was one addressed to him; that it had been dried, and on receipt of twopence it would be sent him. It proved to be a balloon letter from me, and is still preserved as a souvenir of the siege and the sea.
Quite at the beginning of the siege a member of my own family received a letter from me, dispatched by the first balloon which left Paris. Its arrival created quite a sensation in the little Welsh watering-place where she was spending a part of the autumn. People stopped her in the street, and asked to see the "balloon letter." The natives evidently thought that it must have something of the balloon about it.
I recollect Worth's coming to the Legation one day—(and who does not know Worth? He rules the women throughout the civilized and toileted world; and through the women he rules the men, or their pockets at least). Worth was in great distress. His nephew had gone out in a balloon and been captured, and there were rumors that his life was in danger. I promised to ascertain his fate, if possible, and prepared a letter to Count Bismarck, which Mr. Washburne signed. Bismarck replied most promptly, as he always did. And here let me state that during the siege, at the request of anxious wives and parents, we often addressed inquiries to German Head-quarters to ascertain the fate of a husband or a son, and that these inquiries always received the promptest and kindest attention. To the inquiry about young Worth, Bismarck replied that he had been captured attempting to cross the Prussian lines in a balloon; that to cross the Prussian lines in the air was like crossing them on the land; and that the person caught attempting it would be similarly punished; that young Worth was in prison, and would be kept there for a few months, to teach others not to attempt the same thing; but that no other harm had happened, or would happen, to him. I sent for Worth, and read him the letter. He was much relieved, and expressed himself very grateful. Some years later a relative of mine took the material for a dress to Worth, and asked him to make it up. Think of the audacity of such a request! But Worth did it. If gratitude is to be measured not by the magnitude of the favor conferred, but by the sacrifice made by him who confers it, then Worth's gratitude stands out in unequaled grandeur.
But while with the help of balloons the Parisians managed very well to send letters from Paris, it was no easy task to receive them. The pigeon experiment proved a failure. No doubt pigeons can be trained to do their work tolerably well, and the French Government now has a large collection of carriers at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. But during the siege very few succeeded in reaching home. A carrier will scarcely ever make a two days' journey. If night overtakes him, he goes astray, misled perhaps by siren wood-pigeons. In winter, too, the days are short, snow-storms blind him, and hawks pounce upon him. One of the canards circulated in Paris was that the Prussians trained hawks for this purpose. The instinct of the animal, too, seems to teach it to fly northward only. Two or three times a carrier arrived safely, bringing with it one of those marvels of scientific skill, a photographic letter. The microscope revealed the contents of a good-sized newspaper transferred to a scrap of paper that a pigeon could carry under its wing.
Some of the French residing in London took advantage of the "agony column" of the Times to send news to their friends. They had faith in the ubiquity of the great journal, and their faith was rewarded. I doubt if you could so hedge in a city that the Times would not penetrate it. Our Legation in London sent it to us. I received one number a week. In it I found multitudes of prières addressed to Mr. Washburne, and some to myself, begging us to inform Mr. So-and-so, or Madame Blank, that their wife, or husband, or children, were at such and such a place, and all well. When these messages were purely personal, we delivered them. If they were in cipher, or susceptible of a double meaning, we did not. I remember finding a message in cipher, and addressed to the Minister of War. I not only did not deliver it, but I burned it for fear that the favor of receiving our letters and papers accorded us by the German Government might be abused. About two days before the jour de l'an, I received a Times of December 23d, for the Germans purposely delayed our bag, probably that the news, should it become known to the French Government, might not be acted on by it, to the detriment of German military operations. The "agony column" was full of messages to besieged relatives. I thought that the Parisians could receive no more acceptable presents for their New-year's-day, so I copied all the messages which had addresses and sent them by mail. But some had no addresses. How the writers ever expected them to reach their destinations, I do not understand. I copied them too, however, and sent them to the Gaulois. On New-year's morning that journal published them. In a few days it received grateful letters, thanking the editors warmly, and offering to pay a share of the expense, "which must have been great." The Gaulois replied, declining all payment, but modestly assuming great credit to itself for its "unparalleled enterprise," and assuring its correspondents that it should continue to spare no expense to procure them news of their families.