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 Vendome 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, `A Berlin! A 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
vivandiere, 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 fete 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."