The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1

S >> Stephen Gwynn >> The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50

'Ours were what schoolboys would call second choice. Oh, such men! and
without boots, without overcoats, facing arctic weather in wooden
shoes and old sacks--facing the Prussians, too, with old muzzle-
loading guns; but they fought well, and their leader, a man of genius,
made the most of them. I returned two or three times to England--that
is, to Dover--to eat and buy things I could carry, for I could hardly
get anything at Lille, where, by the way, I heard Gambetta make his
great speech. It was the finest oratorical display to which I ever
listened, though I have heard Castelar, Bright, Gladstone, the Prime
Minister Lord Derby, Gathorne Hardy, and Father Felix (the great
Jesuit preacher) often, at their very best.

'Picking up Auberon Herbert, who was on his way to Versailles to wait
for the surrender of Paris in order to take in food to his brother
Alan, who was serving as a doctor on the ambulance inside, I went to
the siege of Longwy. Like all the fortresses of France bombarded in
this war, with two exceptions, it surrendered far too easily.

'From Longwy we passed on to Montmedy, at which latter place we
witnessed the immediate effects of a fearful railway accident, a
collision in a tunnel between a trainful of French prisoners and one
of recruits for the Prussian Guards. The scene in the darkness and
smoke, with the stalwart, long-bearded Landwehr men, who formed the
garrison of the town, holding blazing torches of pine and pitch, and
the glare from the fires of the upset engines, was one which would
have delighted Rembrandt. When a rush of water, a cataract from the
roof of the lately blown-up tunnel, suddenly occurred, adding to the
horror of the night, the place was pandemonium. Almost the only men
unhurt in the front carriages, which were smashed to pieces, were the
Mayors of the villages on the line, travelling compulsorily as
hostages for the safety of the trains. I made military reflections on
the advantage of blowing up tunnels, as against the practice of
destroying bridges and so forth.'

Sir Charles was one of the first in Paris after the siege (which was
raised by an armistice on January 29th, 1871), taking in with him a large
quantity of condensed milk, of which he made presents to his Paris
friends. The purpose of the armistice was to enable regular conditions to
be signed between the conqueror and the conquered. The Imperial Government
had declared war on Prussia; but the Empire had fallen and the existing
Government was only provisional. It had a branch in Paris, another branch
in Bordeaux, and between these the investing army barred all
intercommunication. The purpose of the armistice was to allow the holding
of elections throughout France to return a National Assembly, which in its
turn should appoint Ministers fully authorized to treat for peace. The
elections did but emphasize the division between Paris and the provinces,
for in Paris an Ultra-Radical representative was returned, while in the
country a considerable majority of monarchical deputies were elected.
Republican France feared, and not without cause, some attempt to re-
establish a dynasty.

When, on February 20th, the new Government, with Thiers at its head,
signed preliminaries of peace, a condition was included which stipulated
that the Prussian troops should formally enter Paris and remain for three
days in possession of all the forts before evacuating the place. The
National Guard, refusing to obey orders, entrenched itself in Montmartre;
the seat of government was transferred to Versailles, lately the Prussian
headquarters; fighting broke out in the streets, and the control of the
city was seized in the name of the Commune.

So began the second siege, in which revolutionary Paris stood at bay
against those whom they called 'the Prussians of Versailles,' while the
real Prussians, still occupying part of the exterior line of forts, looked
on, impartial spectators. Sir Charles writes:

'At this time my attention was exclusively turned to foreign affairs,
and immediately after my Black Sea speech I started for Paris. I took
with me an appointment as a Daily News correspondent--not that I
intended to correspond, but only because it would explain my presence.
Having been unable to leave London during the first days of the rising
of March 18th, which developed into the Commune of Paris, I left it
with my brother on April 2nd, and reached Creil at night, and St.
Denis in the morning. From Creil I wrote to my grandmother: "We shall
reach Paris in the morning. It is no use writing, and we shall not be
able to write to you." We drove into Paris, and at once went to the
Hotel de Ville, where we found the famous Central Committee sitting.
We obtained from some Garibaldian officers of the Staff a special pass
to leave Paris in order to see Gustave Flourens, for whom I was
carrying a private letter from a friend of his in London.... The drums
were beating through the streets all day, and great numbers of
National Guards were under arms attempting to march upon Versailles,
and there was heavy fighting, which we witnessed from a distance.

'We counted 160 battalions of National Guards all carrying the red
flag, and saw altogether, as near as we could compute, almost 110,000
men. That all Paris was in the movement at this time was clear, not
only from this fact, but also from the following: that on March 26th
between 226,000 and 227,000 electors voted, a full vote for Paris
considering the great number of persons who, having left Paris before
the siege, had not returned. In the municipal elections after the
Commune, when the Conservatives had come back and made a great attempt
to win, the total number of voters was only 186,000. I noticed at the
Hotel de Ville that the Parisians had a great many sailors in uniform
with them. These were sailors who had remained in Paris after serving
there during the siege, and my pass was handed to me by a splendid
specimen of a French tar wearing the name of the _Richelieu_ on his
hat. I was one of the few persons not in the insurrection (and these
were mostly killed) who saw the pictures in the Hotel de Ville so
late--that is, so soon before the fire which destroyed them all--and I
recognized old friends which I had known from 1855, when I was there
at the great ball. Those who showed us from room to room were chiefly
Garibaldian Poles, among them the Dombrowskis, one of whom was killed,
and two of whom I afterwards befriended in London in their exile.

'The next morning we left Paris early by the Vaugirard gate, for no
one could tell us where Flourens was engaged. We had followed the main
line of fighting; his death occurred upon the other line; but so great
was the confusion of these days that we knew nothing of it until the
5th. We thought that to make for Clamart would be the surest course to
bring us to the forefront of battle, and at 8 a.m. we were in Issy. We
then heard heavy firing, and came over the hill between Forts Issy and
Vanves, but there was a dense fog which deadened sound, and it was not
till we were well down the hillside that we heard the crunch of the
machine-guns, when we suddenly found ourselves under a heavy fire from
the other side. Seeing the railway embankment in front of us at the
bottom of the hill, we ran down and got under shelter near an arch at
the corner of a park wall, which may, perhaps, have been the cemetery.
Here we sat in safety while the bullets sang in swarms through the
trees over our heads, while the forts cannonaded the heights, and the
heights bombarded the forts, and while the federal regiments of the
National Guard tried in vain to carry once more the line of hills
which they had carried on the previous day, but had of their own
accord at night abandoned, having no commissariat. They used, in fact,
to go home to dinner. Indeed, many would in the morning take an
omnibus to the battlefield, and fight, and take the omnibus back home
again to dine and sleep--a system of warfare which played into the
hands of the experienced old soldiers--the police of Paris--all ex-
non-commissioned officers, and the equally well-trained Customs guards
and forest guards, by whom they were opposed. General Vinoy, who was
commanding, had, however, heavy work on this day, in which Duval, the
General of the Commune, met his death within a quarter of a mile of
the spot where we were hiding. With this day ended, indeed, the
offensive operations of the Federalists against Versailles, and began
the offensive operations of the regulars against Paris. After sitting
a long time in our corner we found ourselves starved, and ran up the
hill by the park wall, under a heavy fire, to Issy and then walked
into Paris. I have a bullet in my room which struck the wall between
us just as we reached shelter at the top. One of my curiosities of the
time is the official newspaper of April 4th, which was conducted, of
course, for the insurrection, but which played so well at being
official that it announced as good news the telegrams from Algeria
showing that the Arab insurrection was being put down, although the
Government which was putting down this insurrection was the very same
Government which was engaged in putting down the more formidable
insurrection in Paris, to which the journal temporarily belonged.

'On Wednesday, the 5th, my brother went to the fighting at Neuilly
bridge, where the troops from Versailles were beginning to develop a
serious attack, destined, however, to continue for six weeks without
result, for Paris was not entered at this point. I, with a letter from
Franqueville [Footnote: Le Comte de Franqueville, well known to a
large circle of English friends by his book, _Le Gouvernement et le
Parlement Britanniques_ (Paris, 1887).] to the Duc de Broglie,
afterwards Prime Minister, in one pocket, and a pass from the
Insurrection in the other, left Paris at 5 a.m. by the Porte
Montrouge, and walked by Bourg la Reine to La Croix de Berny, and
thence by Chatenay to La Cour Roland, where I met a cavalry patrol of
the regular forces, and then came to an infantry camp. Having shown my
letter, my English passport, and my appointment as a newspaper
correspondent, I was allowed to go on to Versailles. There I slept on
a table, there being a terrible crowd of Paris fugitives in the town.
In the morning I had my interview with the Duke. He was kind to me,
and I saw much of him in London and in Paris in later years. Thiers
was right in alluding to his dull father as "The Duc de Broglie; the
other, _the_ duke." But both were narrow doctrinaires.

'After looking at M. Thiers' reserves, which at this time consisted of
250 guns parked on the Place d'Armes, with no artillerymen to work
them, and a Paris regiment, the 118th, raised during the siege, locked
up in the park to prevent their joining the insurrection, I started
for St. Germain, where I met Major Anson, M.P., afterwards the leader
of "the Colonels" (who resisted abolition of army purchase) in the
House of Commons, and lunched, watching the firing of Mont Valerien on
Paris. I then drove to St. Denis, the Prussian headquarters. Thence I
drove again (the La Chapelle gate of Paris being shut) to Pantin.
After a long parley the Belleville-Villette drawbridge was lowered for
me, and I was admitted to Paris, having been almost all round it in
the two days.

'Major Anson gave me a bag of gold to pay to his brother's (Lord
Lichfield's) cook. This man was in Paris, and on the 7th I called on
him at a house close to the Ministry of the Interior, and to the
Palace of the Elysee. The cook's rooms were at the top of the house,
over the Librairie, still there in 1907. He received the visit of
myself and my brother in bed. "Excuse me," he said, "but I have been
fighting these three days, and I am tired out." I asked his wife what
he was fighting for, and she did not in the least know. No more did
he, for the matter of that. He was fighting because his battalion was
fighting. "The Prussians of Versailles" had taken the place of the
other Prussians; that was all. At this moment 215 battalions of the
National Guard supported the insurrection, having joined in pursuance
of the resolution that, in the event of the seat of Government being
transferred from Paris to any other place, Paris was to constitute
itself a separate Republic. This more than anything else was at the
bottom of the insurrection, and, as M. Jules Simon has said, "many
Republicans who were neither Socialists nor Revolutionists hesitated.
One asked oneself if in fighting on the side of order one was not at
the same time fighting for a dynasty." Then, again, serving in the
National Guard meant pay and food, especially for the working man, for
there was no work to be got in Paris, as business had not been
reopened. Moreover, Paris was writhing with rage at the Prussian
entry, and Parisian vanity was engaged on the side of the
insurrection.

'The insurrection was certainly at this time very far from being a
communistic movement, as from a natural confusion of names it was
thought to be by foreigners. There was a burning jealousy in Paris of
the "Rurals," and a real fear, not ill-founded, that a Royalist
conspiracy was on foot. The irritations of the siege, however, played
the largest part. The National Guard, who had fought very well at
Buzenval on January 19th, profoundly moved by the capitulation, had
carried off their guns to their own part of Paris in February, and it
may be said that the insurrection dated from that time, and was
historically a protest against the peace, for M. Thiers temporized
with the insurrection until the old seasoned soldiers were beginning
to return to him from their captivity in Germany. The fighting began
with the sudden attempt of the Government to remove by force the guns
which had been taken to Montmartre, followed as it was by the murder
of two Generals by the mob. [Footnote: General Lecomte and Clement
Thomas, the Commandant of the National Guard, were shot on March 18th,
1871, under conditions of peculiar brutality.] A number of men threw
themselves into the movement from love of fighting for fighting's
sake, like the Garibaldian Poles. Some joined it from ambition, but
the majority of the men who later on died on the walls or in the
streets in the Federalist ranks died, as they believed, for the
Republic, and had no idea of the plunder of the rich. Ricciotti
Garibaldi was near Dijon "in observation," as he afterwards told me.
He said that he wanted to march upon Versailles with his excellent
little army, which would have followed him, and fought well, and would
certainly have taken the new capital, although it would have been
crushed later on. He telegraphed to Garibaldi, and "Papa" telegraphed
to him not to move, Garibaldi being wiser, perhaps, in his son's case
than he would have been had it been his own, for he was not remarkable
for wisdom. It was a strange moment: the Prussians watching the
fighting from those of the forts which were still in their hands, and
a careless, idle Paris crowd of boys and women watching it from the
walls.

'On the 7th my brother and I were all but killed by a shell from Mont
Valerien which suddenly burst, we not having heard it, close to us in
a garden at the corner of the Place de l'Etoile and Avenue d'Uhrich,
as the Avenue de l'Imperatrice had at this time been named, from the
General who defended Strasbourg. During the 7th and 8th a senseless
bombardment of a peaceable part of Paris waxed warm, and continued for
some days uselessly to destroy the houses of the best supporters of
the Conservative Assembly without harming the Federalists, who did not
even cross the quarter. M. Simon has said that Thiers did not bombard
Paris; that he only bombarded the walls of Paris at the two points at
which he intended to make a breach.... All I can say is that if this
was the intention there must have been someone in command at Mont
Valerien who failed to carry it into effect, and who amused himself by
knocking the best part of Paris to pieces out of mischief, for no
artilleryman could have been so incapable as to fire from hill to hill
when intending to fire down into that which, viewed from Mont
Valerien, looks like a hole. In 1841, curiously enough, Thiers had
been accused, at the time of the erection of the forts of which Mont
Valerien was one, of making it possible that Paris should be bombarded
in this way, and had indignantly replied, asking the Assembly if they
believed that after having _inonde de ses feux la demeure de vos
familles_ a Government could expect to be continued in power. But in
1871 he did it, and was continued in power for a time, and that with
the triumphant support at the moment of the very persons whose houses
he had destroyed. The Commune had a broad back, and that back was made
to bear the responsibility of the destruction.'

Sir Charles returned to his duties in London after the Easter recess, but
he was back in Paris to see the last moments of the second siege. On May
21st the army had forced its way into the city, though several days of
bitter street fighting remained, in which the town was fired, and the
Hotel de Ville and Ministry of Finance were destroyed. [Footnote: Sir
Charles writes of the celebrated order, "Flambez Finances": 'the order to
burn the Ministry of Finance was an undoubted forgery, as a distinguished
Frenchman, signing himself "A Communalist," showed in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_. The evidence before the court-martial of the porter of the
Ministry of Finance, that the fire was caused by shells, confirms my view,
and shows how the events of the moment have been distorted by the passions
of writers.'] Sir Charles had foreseen the destruction of these uildings,
"because they were behind great barricades in the direct line of the
necessary attack," and was also proud of the verification which a minor
military forecast received. Alan Herbert, Auberon's elder brother, who for
many years practised as a doctor in Paris, was awakened on May 21st by a
disturbance in the street, and

'"saw several National Guards and dirty-looking fellows taking counsel
together whether they should raise a barricade opposite my windows,
and they were actually beginning it. However," he wrote to his mother,
Lady Carnarvon, "Sir Charles Dilke, when he was in Paris with Auberon,
came to see me here, and the question being raised as to a barricade
being placed opposite my windows he decided it could not be, as the
only proper place for one would be some doors lower down at the
meeting of the three streets. This recollection was some consolation
to me, and his opinion was quite correct, for an officer arrived,
supposed to have been the General Dombrowski, who made them begin
lower down."'

It was on May 25th that Sir Charles left London to reach Paris, which was
known by the 24th to be in flames.

'Crossing by Calais, I reached St. Denis at night, drove to Le
Bourget, got a pass into Paris from the Germans at dawn, with a
warning, however, that it would not bring me out again. By the
drizzling rain I passed unhindered into Paris, all the gates being
open and the drawbridges down, as the Federalists were both within and
without the walls. I reached the great barricade in front of the gates
of the Docks de la Villette at seven in the morning. My road had been
lighted till the daylight grew strong by the flames of the
conflagration of the warehouses. This day, Friday the 26th, was that
of the third or last massacre of hostages--the thirty-seven gendarmes,
the fifteen policemen, the eleven priests, and four other people, I
believe. It was a very useless crime. When I reached the great
barricade at a meeting of roads, one of which I think was called Route
d'Allemagne, fighting had just recommenced after a pause during the
night. At this point the field artillery were bombarding the barricade
from the Rue Lafayette. I stood all day in comparative safety at the
door of a baker's shop in the Rue de Flandre, for the baker was
interested in what was going on sufficiently to keep his door open and
look out and talk with me, though his shutters were up at all the
windows. When evening came the Federalists still at this point
maintained their strong position, and I, of course, knew nothing of
the movements on the south by which the troops had all but hemmed them
in. The baker with whom I had made friends offered me hospitality for
the night, which I accepted, and I might have stayed longer with him
had I pleased; but not knowing how long the fighting might continue, I
determined to make my way into the Versailles lines at dawn.

'Fighting in our quarter had been again suspended at night, and in the
grey light of early morning (it was fine after a long rain) I left my
baker and made my way to the left, the left again, and then down a
long street towards the Eastern Railway. A sentry about two hundred
yards off presented his piece. I stood still in the middle of the
street. He seemed then not to know what to do. I had on the red-cross
armlet which I wore throughout the war, and held a white handkerchief
in my hand. I suppose I looked respectable enough to be allowed to
come nearer, for he let me advance. When near enough I called to him
that I wished to speak with the officer of the post. He called out a
corporal, to whom I made the same statement. They kept me there for a
time which seemed an age, and then brought an officer. I shouted to
him that I was an English newspaper correspondent, that I had an
authorization as such, an English passport, and a Prussian pass into
Paris, and that I was known to the Due de Broglie and to Lord Lyons;
also that I could name friends in the centre of Paris to whom I might
be sent under guard. He let me pass, and said: "Allez! Vous avez eu de
la chance." I went straight to the Arts et Metiers. The dead were
lying thick in the streets, especially at the Porte St. Martin
barricade, where they were being placed in tumbrils. The fighting had
been very heavy; the troops alone had lost 12,000 killed and wounded
after entering Paris. At least as many Federalists were killed
fighting, or wounded and finished, besides the great number shot after
their surrender. I found Tresca, the father, picking up the pieces of
the shells which were bursting in the courtyard, and putting them all
together with wires, to the greater glory of his own particular make.
It was the Federal artillery on the heights which was bombarding Paris
with Tresca's shells. When one burst perfectly into some twenty equal
pieces he would say:" Beautiful; that is one of mine." Any that burst
into one large piece and two or three little ones he set down to the
"genie militaire" of Vincennes.

'After several days I left Paris with Dr. W. H. Russell of the
_Times_, my former opponent at Chelsea at the '68 election, whom I had
last previously seen at Nancy on the day of Mars la Tour, and returned
to London, having for the purpose of leaving Paris a pass from Marshal
MacMahon's Chief of the Staff, which I still preserve.' [Footnote:
This Diary Extract of the War of 1870 was published in the _Nineteenth
Century_ of January, 1914.]

So ends the story. Later in life, during his championship of army reform
in the House of Commons, a Tory Colonel interrupted the civilian critic
with some bluntness. "I have been on more battlefields," Sir Charles
retorted, "than the honourable and gallant member has ever seen." The
white ambulance cap, with its black and green peak, which he preserved as
a memento, bore on its lining:

"WORTH. ORLEANS.
PHALSBOURG. LONGWY.
MARS LA TOUR. BAPAUME.
GRAVELOTTE. PARIS."

Preserved among Sir Charles's papers, and dated September 30th, 1870,
there is this letter from John Stuart Mill:

"If Gladstone had been a great man, this war would never have broken
out, for he would have nobly taken upon himself the responsibility of
declaring that the English Navy should actively aid whichever of the
two Powers was attacked by the other. This would have been the
beginning of the international justice we are calling for. I do not
blame Gladstone for not daring to do it, for it requires a morally,
braver man than any of our statesmen to run this kind of risk."