Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

non in the Bois get broken up for one thing by the tree-trunks, and then the sound has to climb over the enceinte, the railway viaduct, and the hill of Passy." She spoke as calmly as if she had been talking of the weather; and it seemed to me, indeed, that all the few people who were about shared the good lady's nonchalance. Certainly there seemed nowhere any indication of apprehension that the Versaillist hand was to be on the Communist throat before the going down of that Sabbath sun.

I had a horse in Paris, which I had left there since the days of the armistice. It was the same noble steed on which I had ridden in by the gate of St. Ouen, the first "outsider" into Paris after the capitulation, on which occasion the hungry Bellevillites had gazed upon the plump beast with greedy eyes. My first quest was after this animal. I found it, but there was a sentry on the stable. The Commune had requisitioned the horse, and the stable-keeper had resisted the requisition on the ground that it belonged to a foreigner. The matter had been compromised by the posting of a sentry over the animal until the authorities should have maturely weighed the grave question. The sentry declined to depart when I civilly entreated him, nor would he allow me to take out the horse; so I had in the mean time to leave the matter as it stood. From the stable I went to the War Ministry of the Commune, on the south side of the river. The utter absence of red tape and bureaucracy there was a shock to the system of the Briton. I remember being pervaded by the same sensation when years later I went to see General Sherman in the War Department at Washington. Ascending a staircase (not in Washington, but in Paris), I entered a big room full of sergeants and private soldiers bustling to and fro. Unheeded, I passed into an inner room, where I found the man whom I wanted writing among a number of other men in uniform, and a constantly changing throng of comers and goers. "Can I see the chief of staff?" I asked. "Of course you can; come with me." We went into a third room, a fine apartment, with furniture in the style of the First Empire; officers swarmed here, from commandants to lieutenants. Privates came in and had a word, and went away. Amid the bustle there was a certain order and also, seemingly, a certain thoroughness. Without delay I was presented to a gentleman who, I was told, was the sous-chef of the staff. I said I desired a pass to witness the military operations in the capacity of a correspondent. With a bow he turned to a staff-lieutenant, and bade him write me the order. The lieutenant set to work at once. He asked me whether I wanted an order for the exterior as well as for the interior operations, and said, "Bon," approvingly when I

told him I wanted an order that would allow me to go anywhere and see everything. The sous-chef signed it with the signature "Lefèbre Toncier," told me if ever I wanted any favor or any information to come to him, and made me a civil bow. I think I may reckon that this was the last permit signed by Communist authority.

General Dombrowski was the last of the many generalissimos of the Commune; he had held the command for about a day and a half. His headquarters, I was told, were away out to the west in the Château de la Muette, just behind the enceinte and close to the railway station of Passy. I went to the cab-stand in the Place de la Concorde, and told the first cabman to drive me to the château. "No, monsieur; I have children!" was the reply. I got a cocher less timid, who agreed to drive me to the beginning of the Grande Rue de Passy. As we passed the Pont de Jéna the Communist battery on the Trocadéro began to fire. Mont Valérien replied. One, two, three shells from it fell on the grassy slope where I had seen the German soldiers on their entry into Paris lie down and drink their fill of its beauties. One shell felled a lamp-post on the steps close by, and burst on the flags. My cabman struck, and very nearly carried me back with him in his hurry to be out of what he evidently considered an unpleasant neighborhood. There was nothing for me but to alight, and to go on foot up the Grande Rue. Here there was hardly any resident population, but a large colony of shell-holes. National guards, sailors, and franctireurs had quartered themselves in the houses, and lounged idly about the pavements. There were no symptoms of fear anywhere, and the shells were coming into the vicinity pretty freely. At the further end of the street I turned to the right through a large gateway into a short avenue of fine trees, at the end of which I entered the Château de la Muette. Dombrowski gave me a most hearty and cordial greeting, and at once offered me permission to attach myself to his staff permanently, if I could accept the position as it disclosed itself. "We are in a deplorably comic situation here," said he, with a smile and a shrug, "for the fire is both hot and continuous."

Dombrowski was a neat, dapper little fellow of some five feet four inches, dressed in a plain, dark uniform with very little gold lace. His face was shrewd-acuteness itself; he looked as keen as a file, and there was a fine, frank, honest manner with him, and a genial heartiness in the grip of his hand. He was the sort of man you take to instinctively, and yet there were ugly stories about him. He wore a slight mustache and rather a long chin-tuft, which he was given to pulling as he talked. He

spoke no English, but talked German fluently. His staff consisted of eight or ten officers, chiefly plain young fellows who seemed thoroughly up to their work, and with whom, not to be too pointed, soap and water seemed not so plentiful as was their consummate coolness. Dombrowski ate, read, and talked all at once, while one could hardly hear his voice for the din of the cannonade and the whistle of the shells. He showed great anxiety to know whether I could tell him anything as to the likelihood of German intervention, and it struck me that he would be very glad to see such a solution of the strange problem. We had got to the salad when a battalion commandant, powdergrimed and flushed, rushed into the room and exclaimed in great agitation that the Versaillist troops were streaming inside the enceinte at the gate of Billancourt, which his command had been holding. The cannonade from Issy had been so fierce that his men had been all under shelter, and when the Versaillists came suddenly on, and they had to expose themselves and deliver musketry-fire, the shells fell so thick and deadly that they bolted, and then the Versaillists had carried the gate, and now held it. His men had gone back in a panic. He had beaten them-sacré nom, etc.-with the flat of his sword till his arm ached, but he had not

gate of Billancourt. Dombrowski waited until the gasping officer had exhausted himself, then handed him a glass of wine with a smile, and with a serene nod turned to his salad, and went on eating it composedly and reflectively. At length he raised his head:

"Send to the Ministry of Marine for a battery of seven-pounders; call out the cavalry, the tirailleurs [of some place or other, I did not catch where], and send such and such battalions of national guards. Let them be ready by seven o'clock. I shall attack with them, and lead the attack myself."

The Ministry of Marine, I may remark, had been turned into an arsenal. It was a sign of the times that the officer to whom Dombrowski dictated this order, like himself a Pole, did not know where to find the Ministry of Marine. Directions having been given him as to its locality, the lieutenant suggested that he might not be able to get a whole battery.

"Bring what you can, then," said Dombrowski; "two, three, or four guns, as many as you can, and see that the tumbrils are in order. Go and obey!"

"Go and obey" was the formula of this peremptory, dictatorial, and yet genial little man. He had a splendid commanding voice, and one might have judged him accustomed to dictat

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

ASSASSINATION OF GENERALS CLEMENT THOMAS AND JULES LECOMTE, AT MONTMARTRE, MARCH 18, 1871.

succeeded in arresting the panic, and his battalion had now definitely forsaken the enceinte. The Versaillists were massing in large numbers to strengthen the force that had carried the

ing, for he would break off to converse and take up the thread again, as if he had been the chief clerk of a department.

While Dombrowski was eating his prunes

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

after his salad,-like most Poles, he seemed a miscellaneous feeder,-there came bustling in a fussy commandant with a grievance. His grievance was thus expressed: "General, I have been complained against because I have too large a staff, and have been ordered to bring the return to you." Dombrowski took the return, and read it. "A commandant," he exclaimed," and with a staff of ten officers! What!" Here he rose and swept his arm round the table with a gesture of indignation. "Look, citizen commandant! Here am I, the general, and behold my staff, nine hard-working men; and you, a commandant, have ten loafers! I allow you one secretary; go and obey!" And the discomfited commandant cleared out.

The shell-fire was increasing. Dombrowski told me that the Château de la Muette belonged to a friend of Thiers, and that therefore, although it was known to be his headquarters, there were orders that it should be somewhat spared. All I have to say is, that if

there were any efforts made to spare it, the Versaillist gunners were very bad shots. One shell went through the wall bounding the avenue; another struck the corner of the house so hard that I thought it was through the wall. Dombrowski's nerves were strong, and he had trained his staff to perfection. When this shell burst he was speaking to me. I started. I don't think his voice vibrated a single chord. The officers sitting round the table noticed the explosion no more than if it had been a snapping-bonbon at a ball supper. A soldier waiter was filling my cup with coffee. The spout of the coffee-pot was on the cup. There was no jar; the man's nerves were like iron. There was good, quiet, firm, undemonstrative stuff here, whatever there might be elsewhere. Dombrowski's adjutant took me up-stairs to the roof, where there was an observatory. The staircase and upper rooms had been very freely knocked about by shell-fire, notwithstanding the friendship of M. Thiers for the owner of the château. The observatory, which was of

wood planking, was riddled with chassepot bullets; and when I showed myself incautiously on the leads, I drew fire with an alacrity so surprising that I was not in the slightest degree ashamed to make a precipitate retreat.

The park of the Château de la Muette slopes down to the enceinte in front of Passy. One could not see the enceinte for the foliage. Beyond the enceinte was a belt of clearing, then came the dense greenery of the Bois de Boulogne, and behind this green fringe was the bed of the great lake. From this fringe of wood great isolated puffs of smoke were darting out. Those were from single cannon. I saw no concentrated battery. But there clearly were at intervals single cannon in small emplacements at a distance from the enceinte of from 400 to 500 paces. From the edge of the fringe also, behind little trenches at the throats of the drives, smaller puffs spurted from the chassepots of Versaillist marksmen trying to pick off the Federals on the enceinte and on the advanced horn-works in front of the gates of Passy and Auteuil. Just above the gate of Passy the Federals had a battery on the enceinte, which was firing steadily and with good effect. The gate of Passy was not much injured, but might have been stormed by a resolute forlorn hope, were it not for the earthen outwork thrown up during the Prussian siege. The gate of Auteuil and the enceinte for some distance on each side were utterly ruined. This Dombrowski did not attempt to deny. But he pointed out that the advanced earthwork was held, and strongly held-not an obstacle, perhaps, it seemed to me, to thwart men bent on gaining an object or losing their lives, but quite sufficient to all appearance to keep the cautious Versaillists from exposing themselves in the open on the way to it. Further south, by the gate of Billancourt and round to the Seine, the enceinte was no great thing to boast of. Certainly no man needed wings to get inside thereabouts. In proof of this, since I joined him, Dombrowski, as I have related, had received tidings that the Versaillists had carried that gate.

There was a good deal more risk than amusement in remaining in the observatory, and I descended to the ground floor. Dombrowski was standing, sword in hand, dictating three orders at once. He stopped to ask me what I thought of the prospect I had looked down on from the roof. I could not conscientiously express the opinion that it was reassuring from the Federal point of view. "I am just dictating an order," said Dombrowski, "which will inform Paris that I abandon the enceinte from the Porte d'Auteuil to the river. If you are a military man, you must recognize the fact that our loss of Fort Issy has made virtually un

VOL. XLIV.- 106.

tenable that section of the continuous fortification of which I speak. Its province was to coöperate with, not to resist, Fort Issy. For several days past I have foreseen the necessity of which I am now informing Paris, and I have prepared a second line of defense, of which the railway viaduct defines the contour, and which I have made as strong as the enceinte and more easily tenable. Yes; the Versaillists are in possession of that gate you heard the flurried commandant talk of. They may have it and welcome; the possession of it will not help them very much. But, all the same, I don't mean to let them keep their hold of it without giving them some trouble, and so I am going to make an attack on them to-night. As like as not they will fall back from their occupancy of to-day, and then they will have the work to do over again to-morrow. But I am not going to fight with serious intent to retrieve this condemned section of enceinte, as the order I have been dictating for publication will show; but merely, as I may say, for fighting's sake. There is plenty of fight still in our fellows, especially when I am leading them."

I could not for the life of me make up my mind, nor have I done so to this day, whether Dombrowski's cheerful words were blague, or whether the little man was really in dead earnest. With a promise from him that he would not start on his enterprise without me, I went into a side room to write a few lines for my newspaper. I had finished, and was instructing the soldier messenger, whom Dombrowski's adjutant was good enough to place at my disposal, where to deliver the packet containing my message, when an urgent summons came to me to join the general. The little man was on top of a very lofty charger, which was dan

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic][subsumed][merged small]

ENGRAVED BY H. WOLF.

FIGHT AT A BARRICADE IN THE BOULEVARD HAUSSMANN. (SPE PAGE 815)

« AnkstesnisTęsti »