George Alfred Henty: The Story of an Active Life

Chapter Twenty Three.
The Vendôme Column

Of course there were patriots and patriots, but, as an observer, Henty’s intercourse with those who vapoured under the self-assumed title seems to have aroused in him scarcely anything but scorn, and more than once he attaches the adjective drunken to the savage barricaders with whom he came in contact during his busy watching of proceedings and his visits to barricade and trench. He describes vividly the state of the streets which had been under fire – shop fronts smashed in, windows shattered, gables and roofs riddled with shrapnel, trees splintered. Every second lamp-post lay a battered wreck on the ground. Here and there a yawning hole revealed a gas-pipe laid open. In another place there would be a pit made as if by pickaxe and shovel, showing where a shell had plunged into the soil, and where the earth had been thrown up as if by some internal revulsion. And everywhere, when firing had ceased, spectators collected to see what mischief had been done where shells had entered and shattered walls. In one spot, where there was something to attract the curious seekers after novelty, upwards of fifty people had collected like a London crowd at an accident, risking their lives as they watched a foolhardy fellow who was digging out a bomb which had not exploded. It was exciting in the extreme, and the spice of danger added to the interest, though the people were so crowded together, that if, as the man dug, the bomb had exploded, the tale of killed and wounded must have been awful. Shakespeare writes of him who gathered samphire half-way down the Dover cliffs, and speaks of it as “dreadful trade”, and this man’s occupation of gathering shells, though profitable, was full of risks. Still it went on, and in spite of the horrors connected with these revolutionary times there were plenty of quick-witted men ready to speculate and take their chances of making an honest penny. Planted in spots where they were out of fire, telescopes were propped up on the side-ways, offering views of the enemy at work in the forts. There was a busy time, too, for the French representatives of the owners of Pantechnicon vans, which bulky vehicles were drawn up at many a door for the removal of the furniture where the houses were within reach of shells.

Horrors were plentiful, and among the statistics gathered by the learned in such matters Henty mentions the fact that the mortality in the National Guard during this stupid civil war was greater in fifty days than for the entire period of the Prussian investment.

A propos of the mock patriots of the Commune engaged in this imbecile insurrection, Henty with his military instincts and contempt for vanity has a word or two for a great soldier. Bonaparte, he says, has left a name that is imperishable in the annals of his country. He fought for France at the head of the French armies. He was the idol of the people, and, dying, his last thoughts were of France. “I desire,” he said, “that my ashes shall be laid to repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the people I love so well;” and his remains were brought back from Saint Helena to be interred as he had asked. Yet his people assisted at the degradation of the memorial raised to his fame – not all the people, but the very dregs of it. “I am no convert,” says Henty, “to the faith of conquest as foreign policy, and an autocracy as the best of domestic governments, but I avow it did cost me, a stranger, something like a pang to see the Vendôme Column fall down on a litter of stable dung, amidst the obscene ribaldry of a mock patriotic rabble and the unmusical fanfares of a make-believe soldiery. Out of the purest love for the nations, they pretended this was done, and as a guage of amity to the world all round. These hypocrites seized a moment when their country was prostrate and galled by defeat in a war with a foreign invader as the fit one to kindle the flames of civil war! They profess that when they rule there shall be no more bloodshed. It shall be the millennium. And yet at the same moment they condemn the generals of the Second Empire for not having overwhelmed the hordes of the German army, and they press their own unwilling fellow-citizens, under pain of court-martial, to go into the ranks to slay or be slain by their brothers. With all their declarations of attachment to the Goddess of Peace, they would be ready to bow to the popular clamour if it took up again the shout, ‘À Berlin! À Berlin!’ sooner than lose the power they have momentarily succeeded in: clutching within their grasp, and this while they jabber of despotism, and swear they have pulled over the pillar to Bonaparte because he was a despot. The circumstance that the tricolour was hoisted on the column before it fell, and waved so that all might see it, is safe evidence that these ignorant Frenchmen knew not what they did. For the tricolour is the national emblem, and these harlequins desired that this national symbol should go down into the dust with the emperor’s statue before their sheet of unhallowed crimson. It was but a poor victory to raise the red flag of the Commune over the tricolour in the heart of the disarmed city, while the same red was retiring before the tricolour in the outskirts. As I looked on at this sorry spectacle from the head of the Rue de la Paix, I overheard a Forfarshire man remark in Doric English to an acquaintance among the bystanders, ‘I am not sanguinary, but I own I would not weep if a volley were fired into those blackguards.’ Neither am I sanguinary, but I own I could almost sympathise with the Scotchman’s wish.

“As soon as this piece of vandalism had been perpetrated a picket of cavalry some score strong, which had been keeping the ground, trotted backwards and forwards for a few minutes to prevent the mass of spectators from pushing on to the scene where the colossal memorial in bronze and stone lay like a corpse. When the crowd found there was no danger, it streamed along the thoroughfare, and the members of the Commune yielded to the desire of the public to walk by the fallen monument. As soldiers are marched by the dead body of a comrade who has been shot, the Parisians that chose had the privilege of penetrating into the Place by batches, and leaning over the fallen Caesar. National Guardsmen stood on either side on the top of the barricade, barring the entrance, and behind them on the crest of the work were ranged masquerading mariners, some with revolvers in their belts and cigars in their mouths, a few gaping miscreants in the uniform of soldiers of the line, and of course the Paris urchin with his bold, merry face, who turns up in every scene of popular commotion. The base of the column was still erect on the Place, its jagged surface, where the shaft had broken off, covered over with plaster dust as if snow had fallen there recently. Red flags had already been fixed on cross poles on the platform it afforded, and captains of the staff, with the inevitable vivandière, lounged in graceful attitudes, looking on the world beneath from their novel and unaccustomed elevation. The capital of the column seemed to have turned in the fall, for the figure of the emperor lay buried in the litter with the face to the sky.”

Some of those admitted to the spectacle of great Caesar low had the bad taste to spit on the face, thus proving how thoroughly justified was the English correspondent’s feeling of utter scorn for mob patriotism. Henty ends his description of the fall with the words: “I should have mentioned that the only display of bunting in the Rue de la Paix during the fête of the rabble was on the houses of the British and American residents, and their flags were floating merely to signify that the property beneath was foreign. One flag peculiarly suited to the Commune at the time was conspicuous by its absence – the black flag of death.”

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.