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We need audacity, and yet more audacity, and always audacity!
GEORGES DANTON
From September 1914 to November 1918, Paris lived with war at the bottom of the garden. The trenches were as close as Times Square is to Bridgeport, Connecticut, or Santa Monica to Catalina Island. Commanders complained of inquisitive tourists wandering into the war zone, hoping for a closer look. In August 1914, American novelist Edith Wharton visited the border with Alsace and peeked over the mountain crest at the German batteries guarding it—after which, she explained, “we retreated hurriedly and unpacked our luncheon-basket on the more sheltered side of the ridge.”
Flicking zeppelins
Parisians got used to the distant thud of artillery. Zeppelins flew over the city, but since the bombs dropped were small, one could shrug off the occasional crater. The cover on the issue for April 1916 of La Vie Parisienne, the Playboy of its day, shows an underdressed young woman flicking away zeppelins as if they’re party balloons. Inside, the editors give fashion tips on what to wear in the air raid shelter. They recommend an ermine-trimmed evening coat over your nightgown. For head protection, they suggest borrowing a cap from your chauffeur.
In the absence of any recent experience, the war, both in Paris and at the front, was being improvised day by day. Which helps explain the episode of the taxis of the Marne.
When the Prussians defeated the French in 1871, they seized Alsace-Lorraine, the mineral-rich region along their border with France. Ever since, the loss of the province had maddened the French like an amputated limb that perversely continued to itch. On the Place de la Concorde, patriots draped in black a statue representing the eastern cities of Lille and Strasbourg, and laid wreaths there on state occasions. In Alsace itself, women discarded the red ribbons of their traditional headdress, vowing to wear only black ribbons until the German “theft” was corrected.
In Alsace!
The moment France mobilized in August 1914, General Joffre put into force Plan XVII. Four of France’s five armies, a total of 800,000 men, charged to the east, intent on reclaiming its lost territory. France’s most popular picture magazine, L’Illustration, its equivalent of Life, led the issue of August 25 with a full-page drawing of a French officer, saber in hand, embracing a swooning Alsatian girl in her black headdress while his men surged past, trampling the spread-eagle standard of the Deutsches Reich. The caption was unequivocal. En Alsace! In Alsace!
Journalists were delirious. “I have pinned on my wall, opposite the end of my bed, the newspaper that carries in letters of triumph these remarkable words: ‘The French in Alsace.’ And I feed, without ever being satisfied, on this flamboyant headline. It has captured my heart. It pours on me like a refreshing wine. It drenches the totality of my soul.”
In fact, Joffre had barely sighted Alsace when the Germans invaded Belgium and poured through on his flank. By the time that issue of L’Illustration went on sale, he was in full retreat. Adolphe Messimy, minister of war, called his senior general, Joseph-Simon Gallieni, out of retirement and offered him the thankless job of Paris’s military governor. With it went command of the Sixth Division, all that remained to defend the city—not, emphasized Messimy, that Gallieni would actually need to fight, since defeat appeared inevitable. Joffre, ever cautious, planned to retreat across the Seine, if not farther, before he made a stand. Gallieni and his men should join him, leaving Paris to fend for itself.
But Gallieni was old school. Thin and tough as a riding crop, he’d graduated from France’s West Point, the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr. After a career mostly spent overseas, quelling rebellions in Madagascar and Indochina, he’d been offered command of the army in 1911. Though only in his late fifties, he turned it down, knowing he was dying of prostate cancer. The job went to “Papa” Joffre, whom he detested. “How fat he is,” Gallieni sighed when he heard of the appointment. “He won’t last three years.” As it was, Joffre outlived him by fifteen years.
Gallieni took a day to think about Messimy’s offer, then obeyed the call of duty that had ruled him all his life. The government, relieved to have found someone to cover its rear and its embarrassment, scuttled off to Bordeaux, at the other end of the country. Paris’s street singers, the Saturday Night Live of the time, greeted this news with a parody of the national song, La Marseillaise. The original words, Aux armes, citoyens / Formez vos bataillons—To arms, citizens / Form your batallions—became Aux gares, citoyens / Montez dans les wagons—To the railroads, citizens / Board your wagons.
General Gallieni
But abandoning Paris did not even cross Gallieni’s mind. On September 2, as the Germans leaped the Marne and came within twenty miles of the capital, close enough for their scouts to see the Eiffel Tower, a poster appeared on walls all over the city.
Inhabitants of Paris.
The members of the government of the Republic have left Paris to give a new impetus to the defense of the nation. I have received a mandate to defend Paris against the invader. This mandate I will fulfil to the end.
Gallieni.
Almost immediately, the gamble paid off. By extraordinary luck, the French found the body of an officer from the staff of the German commander, Alexander von Kluck. A map in his pack showed that von Kluck intended to deviate from the invasion plan created by Count Alfred von Schlieffen. Instead of taking Paris, he would swing around the city, hoping to drive the French toward the Swiss border. But in doing so, he would open a thirty-mile gap on his flank. Gallieni badgered Joffre into joining the British in an attack into that breach—the thrust of a stiletto under the ribs.
From getting troops into Paris to defend it, Gallieni’s problem changed to getting them out to where they were needed. He had called up the Seventh Division from reserve, but the men were stuck on the choked railway system. Rather than bring them into the bottleneck of Paris, he ordered the trains stopped at villages on the outskirts. But how to transport thousands of men from there to the Marne?
One of the taxis of the Marne, preserved in the museum of the Hôtel des Invalides
In 1940, hundreds of pleasure craft and fishing boats would be mobilized to cross the English Channel and rescue British and French troops trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. Twenty-six years earlier, Gallieni had a similar idea. Why not move the troops in private cars and taxis?
“That’s brilliant, mon général,” stammered an aide.
Believing, as did Ernest Hemingway, that “praise to the face is sheer disgrace,” Gallieni harrumphed “Eh bien, voilà au moins qui n’est pas banal!” (Well, at least it’s original!)
A call went out for automobiles and people to drive them. Racing cars, buses, and 150 of Paris’s notoriously cranky cabbies assembled in front of the Hôtel des Invalides, the seventeenth-century veterans’ hospital that had become army headquarters. Gallieni immediately sent them off in convoys, empty, to collect soldiers from villages such as Tremblay-lès-Gonesses, buried today under the runways of Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The red-painted Renault AG taxi was high and narrow, built to squeeze through congested streets. Its driver sat outside. Usually the compartment behind him carried only three passengers, but in 1914 five soldiers squeezed in, with their weapons and kit. They had a rough ride as the cabs jounced over dirt roads in the dark: headlights might have alerted the Germans. But astonishingly, it all worked, thanks in part to generous rations of pinard, the rough red wine the troops would rather drink than water.
In the course of two days, six hundred taxis ferried four thousand soldiers to the front. Their presence was decisive. The counterattack stopped the Germans dead, then forced them into retreat. It might have become a rout and ended the war, but Joffre lacked the men, the equipment, and the initiative to exploit his advantage. At the river Marne, forty miles from Paris, he dug in. So did the Germans. With their momentum lost and the Russians looming on their eastern border, they were effectively defeated. But the war would drag on for another four years. From time to time, one side created a “salient” or bulge in the line that the other forced back in place. When, occasionally, an assault broke through, the attackers had no plans for consolidating their success and were driven back to their trenches.
In part because of its incongruous use of taxis, the first Battle of the Marne was never taken as seriously as the failed battles of the Somme and Ypres that followed. This was still the phony war, the one that could end by Christmas. Troops had not yet become numbed to absurdities, and could respond to them with a sense of fun.
One such incident took place on September 11 near the village of Bregy, as the French pursued the retreating Germans. A young artist, Georges Bruyere, reported it to his family in a letter.
We came up on a battalion of chasseurs taking a break. Some were standing in a circle around an object, and then, impossible as it was, we heard a piano. What was it playing? A silly little waltz, one of those waltzes you hear at neighborhood dances, dear to the sentimental hearts of shop girls. But on the tragic immensity of this plain where the shadows were beginning to gather, it took on a character one couldn’t express.
As the tune suddenly changed, we realized it was a mechanical piano. The melancholy waltz was replaced by the craziest kind of polka from the old days. Closing my eyes, I thought the plain was spinning around me. But that wasn’t it! The group of soldiers was in motion. With grins on their faces, they raised their arms, couples formed, and the dance began.
Just as war didn’t stop the French from staging an impromptu dance on the battlefield, it never succeeded in stifling the commercial instinct, least of all in taxi drivers. As the front stabilized, they presented their bills: forty miles to the Marne and back, and at night rates too. And then there was the gasoline. . . . The ministry bargained them down to 27 percent—including tip. War or no war, some things about Paris were eternal.