Chapter VII: Inside Paris: Siege and Commune--The Barricades (2)

And if Maurice began clinging to this wild dream, it was because of his secret discontent with the Commune itself. He despaired of the men composing it, felt them to be incompetent, pulled this way and that by conflicting views and interests, growing more and more exasperated, losing their heads, and lapsing into imbecility as their peril gradually increased. Of all the social reforms to which the Commune was pledged, it had been unable to realise a single one; and it was already certain that it would leave no durable work behind it. But the great evil from which it suffered was the rivalry tearing it asunder, the mutual suspicion which consumed each of its members. Many of them, the Moderates, the timid ones, had already ceased taking any part in the deliberations. The others acted on the spur of the moment, as events might suggest, trembled at the prospect of a possible dictatorship, had reached indeed that phase when the factions of revolutionary assemblies exterminate one another in the hope of saving the Commonwealth. After Cluseret, after Dombrowski, it became Rossel's turn to be suspected. Delescluze, appointed civil delegate at War, could himself do nothing, despite his great authority. And on the other hand the social effort, of which there had been just a faint glimpse, subsided to insignificance, proved utterly abortive amid the hourly increasing isolation of these men, rendered powerless by dissension and reduced to acts of despair.

Terror was rising in Paris. Irritated, at first, against Versailles, shuddering at memory of the sufferings of the siege, the city was now detaching itself from the Commune. The compulsory enrolment, the decree incorporating every man under forty years of age in the insurrectionary forces, had angered people of calm minds and caused a flight _en masse_; some folks went off by way of St. Denis, disguised and provided with spurious Alsatian passports,[55] others with the help of ropes and ladders let themselves down into the ditch of the fortifications on dark nights. The wealthy people of the middle class had long since taken themselves off. Not a factory, not a workshop had reopened its doors. There was no trade, no work, the old life of idleness continued during that anxious wait for the inevitable ending. And the people--the poorer classes--still lived upon the paltry pay allowed to each National Guard--that franc and a half per diem paid from the millions which were now being requisitioned from the Bank of France, that franc and a half for the sake of which alone many men still continued fighting, and which was really one of the primary causes, the why and wherefore of the insurrection. Entire districts had become depopulated, the shops were shut, the house-fronts lifeless. And in the deserted streets under the warm sun of that lovely month of May, there was nothing to look at but the funerals of Federals who had been killed in action--processions unaccompanied by any priest, but fraught with a barbaric pomp, the hearses draped with red flags and followed by crowds wearing 'button-holes' of _immortelles_. The churches, closed for purposes of worship, became transformed every evening into political club-rooms. Only revolutionary newspapers were published, all the others had been suppressed. And all this was tantamount to the destruction of Paris, that great, ill-fated Paris which, like the Republican capital it was, still retained a feeling of repulsion for the Assembly, even while its terror of the Commune, and its impatience to be delivered from it, grew and spread amid all the alarming rumours that circulated--rumours of the daily arrest of hostages, and of barrels of gunpowder lowered into the sewers, where men were said to watch with lighted torches waiting for a signal.

And at this stage Maurice, who hitherto had never been inclined to drink, found himself caught and submerged as it were in the universal intoxication. At present, when he was on duty at some advanced post or spent the night in a guard-room, it frequently happened that he accepted a nip of brandy. And if he took a second nip excitement followed, fanned by the breath of his comrades as it blew past his face, reeking with alcoholic fumes. The drunkenness had become chronic, an all-invading epidemic, bequeathed by the first siege, aggravated by the second; for if the population had lacked bread it had always possessed brandy and wine in profusion, and had so saturated itself with drink, that the merest drop now sufficed to make it delirious. For the first time in his life, on the evening of Sunday, May 21, Maurice came back drunk to his lodging in the Rue des Orties, where he still slept from time to time. He had again spent the day at Neuilly, firing at the Versaillese and drinking with his comrades in the hope of surmounting the intense weariness which was overpowering him. Then with his head in a fog and his limbs exhausted, he had come and thrown himself on the bed in his little room, led thither by instinct, for he never remembered how he had managed to make the journey. And on the following morning the sun was already high in the heavens when the tumult of alarm bells, drums, and bugles at last aroused him. On the previous evening, finding a gate of the ramparts at the Point-du-Jour abandoned, the Versaillese had entered Paris unopposed.

Hastily dressing, and taking his gun, which he slung over his shoulder, Maurice went down into the street, and, scarcely had he reached the district municipal offices, when a cluster of scared comrades whom he met there acquainted him with the events of the evening and the night, in so confused a way, however, that it was at first difficult for him to understand the position. The fort of Issy and the great battery at Montretout had been pounding away at the ramparts for ten days past, and with such effect that the St. Cloud gate of the fortifications had at last become untenable. An assault had therefore been resolved upon, and was to have taken place on the morning of May 22. But on the afternoon of the 21st, at about five o'clock, a passer-by, seeing that nobody remained guarding the St. Cloud gate, simply beckoned to the Versaillese posted in the trenches, which were scarcely fifty yards away. Two companies of the 37th of the Line thereupon at once entered the city, and behind them followed the whole of the Fourth Corps, commanded by General Douay. The troops poured into Paris in a ceaseless stream throughout the night. At seven in the evening General Vergé's division set out towards the Grenelle bridge, and even pushed forward as far as the Trocadéro. At nine o'clock General Clinchant captured Passy and La Muette. At three in the morning the First Corps was camping in the Bois de Boulogne; and at about the same hour General Bruat's division crossed the Seine to carry the Sèvres gate and facilitate the entrance of the Second Corps, which, under the orders of General de Cissey, occupied the Grenelle district an hour later. Thus on the morning of the 22nd the army of Versailles held the Trocadéro and La Muette on the right bank of the river, and Grenelle on the left bank; and this to the stupor, wrath, and consternation of the Commune, whose members were already accusing one another of treachery in their agony at the idea that annihilation was now inevitable.

This, too, was Maurice's first feeling when he at last understood the situation. The end had come, and no course remained but to meet death boldly. Meantime, however, the alarm bells were pealing, the drums were beating more loudly, women and even children were helping to build barricades, and the streets were filling with all the feverish stir and bustle of the battalions hastily assembled and hurrying to their posts of combat. And at midday hope again sprang from the breasts of the excited, determined soldiers of the Commune when they found that the Versaillese had scarcely stirred from their positions. This army, which they had feared to find at the Tuileries in a couple of hours' time, manœuvred with extraordinary caution, profiting by the stern lessons of defeat, and exaggerating the tactics which it had learnt at such dire cost from the Germans.[56] Meantime the Committee of Public Safety, and Delescluze, the delegate at War, organised and directed the defence from their quarters at the Hôtel-de-Ville. It was noised abroad that they had disdainfully repulsed a supreme attempt at conciliation. These tidings inflamed the courage of their partisans; the triumph of Paris once more seemed assured, and on all sides the resistance was to be as fierce as the attack had been implacable--such was the hatred, fed by lies and atrocities, which burnt in the hearts of either army.

Maurice spent that day in the neighbourhood of the Champ de Mars and the Invalides, falling back slowly from street to street whilst firing upon the troops. He had not been able to find his own battalion, and was fighting in company with some comrades who were strangers to him, and who had led him to the left bank of the river without his even noticing it. Towards four o'clock they defended a barricade blocking the Rue de l'Université, at the point where it reaches the Esplanade des Invalides; and they did not abandon this position until the twilight fell and they learned that Bruat's division, stealing along by way of the quay, had secured possession of the Corps Législatif. As it was, they narrowly escaped being caught, and only reached the Rue de Lille with great difficulty, after making a long round through the Rue St. Dominique and the Rue Bellechasse. When night fell the army of Versailles occupied a line starting from the Vanves gate, on the left bank of the Seine, and passing by way of the Corps Législatif across the river to the Elysée palace, the church of St. Augustin, and the St. Lazare railway station, until it finally reached the Asnières gate on the north-west.

It was the morrow, May 23, a beautiful spring Tuesday, bright with warm sunshine, which proved the terrible day for Maurice. The few hundred Federals of various battalions, among whom he found himself, still held the whole district from the quay to the Rue St. Dominique. Most of them, however, had bivouacked in the gardens of the large mansions lining the Rue de Lille, and he himself had fallen fast asleep on a lawn adjoining the palace of the Legion of Honour. He fancied that the troops would emerge from the Corps Législatif at dawn to drive him and his comrades behind the strong barricades which had been thrown up in the Rue du Bac, but several hours went by and there were no signs of an attack. The combatants merely continued exchanging random shots from one to the other end of the streets. All this, however, formed part of the plan of the Versaillese, which was now being slowly, cautiously carried out. Firmly resolved not to attempt a front attack upon the formidable fortress into which the insurgents had converted the Tuileries terrace, they had decided upon a double advance along the ramparts on either side of the river in view of capturing Montmartre on the north and the Observatory on the south to begin with, and thence swooping down upon the city, surrounding the central quarters and seizing upon them at one great stroke. Towards two o'clock Maurice heard a comrade say that the tricolour flag was waving over Montmartre. Simultaneously attacked by three army corps, whose battalions had climbed the height on its northern and western sides, the great battery of the Galette windmill had been captured; and the victors were now streaming down into Paris, carrying in turn the Place St. Georges, the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, the municipal offices in the Rue Drouot, and the Grand Opera House; whilst on the left bank the turning movement, starting from the Montparnasse Cemetery, was now reaching the Place d'Enfer and the Horse Market. At these tidings of the rapid progress made by the army the Communists gave way to stupor, wrath, and fright. What! Montmartre had been carried in a couple of hours--Montmartre, the glorious, impregnable citadel of the insurrection! Maurice noticed that the ranks were thinning around him, that trembling comrades were slinking away to wash their hands and slip on a blouse, in their fear of the troops' reprisals. It was rumoured, too, that they would soon be turned by way of the Croix-Rouge crossway, the attack on which was now being prepared. The barricades in the Rue Martignac and the Rue Bellechasse had already been carried, and the insurgents were beginning to espy the red trousers of the soldiers at the end of the Rue de Lille. And now the Communist force upon this point became limited to the men of conviction, the desperate ones; Maurice and some fifty others who were resolved to die after killing as many as possible of those bloodthirsty Versaillese who treated the Federals as bandits, dragging those whom they made prisoners to the rear of their line of battle and shooting them down there. Since the previous day the execrable feelings of hatred animating either side had yet increased; it was now a war of extermination between those rebels dying for their dream, and that army hot with reactionary passions and exasperated at still having to fight.

At about five o'clock, whilst Maurice and his comrades were finally retreating to seek the shelter of the barricades in the Rue du Bac, making their way from door to door down the Rue de Lille and still firing as they went, the young fellow suddenly perceived a mass of dense black smoke pouring out of an open window of the palace of the Legion of Honour. It was the first of the conflagrations kindled in Paris; and in the furious insanity that now possessed him he experienced a fierce delight. The hour had come: might the whole city flare like a huge sacrificial pyre, might fire purify the world! But all at once he was overcome with astonishment. Five or six men had just rushed out of the palace, led by a big fellow in whom he recognised Chouteau, his former comrade in the 106th of the Line. Maurice had caught sight of the scamp once before, just after the 18th of March, when he was already wearing the gold-laced cap of an officer. Since then he must have risen in rank, for his uniform was now covered with galloons. Maybe he was attached to the staff of some Communist general who shirked fighting; and indeed Maurice suddenly remembered that a comrade had told him various anecdotes of this fellow Chouteau, who had been quartered at this very palace of the Legion of Honour, where in the company of his mistress he had led a life of continual jollity, lying booted and spurred in the sumptuous beds, and smashing the plate-glass mirrors with shots from his revolver just by way of a lark. It was asserted, too, that his mistress, under pretence of going to market, drove out every morning in a gala carriage, in which she carried away bales of linen, clocks, and even articles of furniture. Thus, when Maurice caught sight of the rogue running away with his men, and still carrying a can of petroleum, he experienced a sensation of uneasiness, a frightful doubt, a wavering of all the blind faith which had been buoying him up. Was it possible that the great work could be evil, since it had such a man as Chouteau for its artisan?

Several hours elapsed and still he fought, but in a distressful fashion, conscious of no feeling save a sombre determination to die. If he had erred, might he atone for his error with his blood! The barricade at which he found himself barred the Rue de Lille at the point where this street was intersected by the Rue du Bac. It was a formidable one, strongly built of sandbags and barrels of earth and faced by a deep ditch. Maurice was holding it with barely a dozen Federals, all of them reclining among the sandbags, and with unerring aim picking off every soldier who showed himself. Without moving, without even speaking a word, such was the dogged sullenness of his despair, the young fellow continued exhausting his cartridges until night closed in, watching meantime the growth of the clouds of smoke which were pouring out of the palace of the Legion of Honour, and were swept down into the street by the wind. The flames were not yet visible in the waning daylight. Another conflagration had broken out in a neighbouring mansion. And all at once a comrade ran up to Maurice and warned him that the soldiers, not daring to advance down the street, were approaching through the gardens and houses skirting it, cutting their way through the walls with picks. The end was at hand; the troops might emerge on that very spot at any moment. And, indeed, on a shot being fired from a window above him, he looked up and again saw Chouteau and his men, who were now frantically climbing the stairs of the corner houses on either hand, carrying lighted torches as well as cans of petroleum. Half an hour later, the whole crossway was flaring under the black sky, and Maurice, still reclining behind the barrels and the bags, profited by the vivid light to shoot down any of the soldiers who were imprudent enough to leave the shelter of the doorways and show themselves in the street.

How long did he keep on firing? He no longer had any consciousness of time or place. It might be nine o'clock, ten o'clock perhaps. The abominable work in which he was engaged now gave him a sensation of nausea, as though he were drunk with some loathsome wine which kept on rising from his stomach. Now that the houses were flaming all around, an intense heat, a burning, asphyxiating atmosphere was beginning to envelop him. The crossway, barred on every side by piles of paving stones, had become an intrenched camp which the conflagrations defended with shower after shower of brands. And were not these the orders? To set each district on fire as, one by one, its barricades were abandoned, to check the advance of the troops by a devouring line of furnaces, to burn down progressively each portion of Paris which they, the insurgents, might be forced to surrender? And Maurice already realised that the houses of the Rue du Bac were not the only ones that were burning. Behind him an immense ruddy glow suffused the sky, and he could hear a distant roar as though the whole city were catching fire. Along the Seine, on the right bank, some other gigantic conflagrations must be bursting forth. He had long since seen Chouteau hurry away, fleeing the bullets. One by one, moreover, the most desperate of his comrades took themselves off, terrified by the idea that they might now at any moment be outflanked; and at last he remained there all alone, and was still lying between two sandbags with the one thought of defending the front of the barricade, when all at once some soldiers, having made their way through the courtyards and gardens of the Rue de Lille, came out by a house in the Rue du Bac and swooped down from the rear.

For two long days, amid the excitement of that supreme struggle, Maurice had not given a thought to Jean; nor had Jean since entering Paris with his regiment, which had been adjoined to General Bruat's division, for a single moment remembered his friend Maurice. On the previous day, the corporal had spent his time firing upon the insurgents on the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade des Invalides; and on this, the second, the terrible day of the fighting, he had not left the Place du Palais Bourbon till about noon, when he and his comrades were sent forward to capture the barricades of the neighbourhood as far as the Rue des Saints-Pères. He, usually so calm, had gradually become quite exasperated by that fratricidal war, somewhat influenced in this respect by his comrades, all of whom ardently longed for a rest after so much fatigue and privation. The men who had spent long months as prisoners of war in Germany, and who had only been brought back to France to be re-incorporated in the army, felt thoroughly enraged with Paris; and Jean, for his part, was further incensed by all that he had heard of the abominations of the Commune--deeds which struck at his belief in the rights of ownership, and at his desire for orderly government. He was still the sensible, sober-minded peasant, personifying the very foundation of the nation, desirous of peace in order that one might again begin working, earning money, and recruiting health and strength. And in the growing wrath which now carried away all thought even of his most tender affections, he was especially maddened by the deeds of the incendiaries. What! burn down houses, burn down palaces, simply because one was not the stronger; no, no, anything but that! Only bandits could do such things. And he, who only the day before had been grieved by the summary executions of the Communists captured by the troops, had now lost all control over himself and was like a madman, striking and shouting fiercely, with his eyes starting from their sockets.

It was with a rush that he debouched into the Rue du Bac, followed by the few men of his squad. At first he could distinguish no one, and fancied that the barricade had been altogether abandoned. Then, over yonder, between two sandbags, he caught sight of a Communist who was moving, levelling his gun again, about to fire down the Rue de Lille. And, thereupon, under the furious propulsion of Destiny, he ran up and nailed the man to the barricade with a thrust of his bayonet.

Maurice had not had time to turn. He gave a shriek and raised his head. The conflagrations lighted up both men with a blinding blaze.

'Oh! Jean, my old friend, Jean, is it you?'

Die? Yes, willingly; he was desperately impatient for death. But to die by his brother's hand was too hard; it marred his death--poisoned it with an abominable bitterness.

'Is it you then, Jean--my old Jean?'

Jean looked at him, thunderstruck, abruptly sobered. They were alone; the other soldiers had already started in pursuit of some runaways. All around them the conflagrations were flaring yet higher, the windows were vomiting great red flames, and one could hear the crash of the burning ceilings as they sank inside the houses. Then Jean fell down near Maurice, sobbing, feeling him, trying to raise him up so as to ascertain whether he might not still be able to save him.

'Oh! my poor youngster, my poor youngster!'