retreat.” That was the first major Allied victory on the Western Front. Exploiting the large gap between Kluck’s and Bülow’s armies, General Joffre made a risky manoeuvre and divided the allied forces into three parts. The left and right flanks were composed of French forces, and in the middle, south of the bloody River Marne, along a line between Lagny and Signy-Signets, was the British Expeditionary Force. Pouring into the gap, the British failed to engage the enemy, but the pincers managed to seize the Germans and the battle was won. With that victory, life began to return to the city.
Patrols soon made the rounds of the Paris apartments to which the home comers would return. One of these found Mr and Mrs Witkiewicz in bed, both splashed with blood. At first glance it looked like just another of the ritual suicides of married couples, but then they saw that the shamelessly naked woman was dead and the shockingly nude man was alive. When he regained his senses, Stanislaw learnt that he had become a ‘widower’ and was accused of murdering ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’. They gave him a choice: either to be mobilized into the Foreign Legion at once, or to be shot. He chose the former. No one asked him now if he had a heart murmur and he was sent directly to help bring the newly formed French 9th Army up to strength.
The prominent Parisians returned to their apartments. Many of them didn’t notice the missing food and decorations which Stanislaw had stolen for his beloved. The owners of the apartment in Rue de Rivoli were horrified to hear that ‘the girl’ who had cleaned for them had died in their bed. They didn’t know that the cleaning girl had found the love of her life and had even become ‘Mrs Witkiewicz’ on that last night in evacuated Paris, but they hurried to purchase a new bed and scrub down the walls. Others cleaned their apartments and buildings too, but Paris on the streets looked completely different to Paris from the air. That was the Paris which one German Zeppelin crew member was painstakingly watching on an almost nightly basis. After the Battle of the Marne, the Germans withdrew to a line behind Reims and the soon-bloody River Aisne, but their Zeppelins continued to blitz the French capital.
Those first bomber pilots, among them the one-time artist Fritz Krupp, were bold and adventurous airmen. The bombs in the Zeppelin were stacked one on top of another. The crew consisted of a pilot, a machine-gunner and a bombardier. The latter, unprotected, climbed down into a gondola suspended beneath the giant craft as it flew over Paris. The winds over the Seine would ruffle his hair as he withdrew the priming pins and heaved thirty-kilo bombs over the side of the gondola to plummet down onto the roofs of the city. Each time he dropped a bomb, the Zeppelin would lurch, the pilot would step on the gas, and the flames far below and the column of black smoke would mark where the Zeppelin had been. Anti-aircraft shells whined erratically around the crew, but there were only occasional puffs of smoke from explosions because the artillery still couldn’t raise their guns’ barrels at a steep enough angle, so the lumbering balloon filled with thirty two thousand cubic metres of helium now looked like a robust creature ruling the heights.
For the Zeppelin bombardier Fritz Krupp, the Great War began when he realized he had always hated Paris, even before the war while he still thought he loved it. He had studied painting in France under the great Gustave Moreau back in the nineteenth century, a century he intended to stay in as a painter. Krupp didn’t approve of anything that happened in the art scene after 1900. He even took up residence in Paris, but his canvases — so he thought — emanated the harmony of the young Ingres. Krupp’s classmates André Derain and Paul Cézanne were not of the same mind, however, and as of 1903 they painted with pure colours like ‘wild animals’. Then there was that Picasso and a whole crowd of hungry and impertinent blue-collar artists.
Fritz himself had painted several works ‘à la Cipriano Ruiz de Picasso’ in 1908 and also created a few like Cézanne, and he felt that — if he only wanted to — he would be able to outstrip both of them in their daubings, which were devoid of composition, proportion and harmony. How impertinent they were, in spite of that, and how they ignored him. They started to bother him wherever he went: at the gallery in Rue La Fayette, in Boulevard Voltaire, and when he was using the same prostitutes and worried about catching syphilis. But, despite all this, he didn’t leave Paris. In time, he became their walking shadow and was always somewhere in the same galleries, in the same cafés, but never at the same tables. When Picasso and the poet Max Jacob moved into a little, lice-infested flat in Boulevard de Clichy, he found a similar one (with bedbugs instead of lice) not far from there, in one of the steep streets leading down from the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur; when Picasso moved to Rue Ravignan, to the famous ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ building, Fritz was again close by, having suddenly felt the need to move a little further up Montmartre himself; when Picasso crossed the Seine and moved to Montparnasse, Fritz also decided discreetly to change his address so as be closer to the ateliers near the abattoir in Rue de Vaugirard.
And he saw it all, there in Montparnasse. The once proud pavilions of the 1900 Exposition Universelle had been turned into dismal dwellings for hundreds of ‘ingenious painters’ from the east. These shacks now housed aspiring Italians with guitars and a song on their lips, reclusive Jews from the east, Poles with a weakness for alcohol and tears when they were drunk, Belgians with incorrigibly provincial views — all this was little short of loathsome to Fritz. Why he had found himself a flat near Hôpital Vaugirard he couldn’t say, because he didn’t dare to admit to himself that he was following Picasso.
Then the Great War began. He was mobilized into the Luftwaffe and trained as a Zeppelin bombardier. Finally the day came which he had longed for: he was sent to bomb Paris. But Sergeant Fritz perplexed his crew. They went on raids every third night, and since the bombardier had the best view of the targets and ground fire because he was the one putting his life on the line, the crew had to follow his directions and go along with his choice of targets. The Zeppelin’s orders were to follow the course of the Seine and strike at district offices, government buildings and Les Invalides. In exceptional circumstances — if they encountered heavy enemy fire and contrary winds — the payload could be dropped in other places.
Fritz exploited this loophole and directed his airship LZ-37 to tactically dubious destinations. First he had the vessel make for Montmartre, and there, night after night, he took aim at Boulevard de Clichy, the steep cobblestone streets around Sacré Coeur, and Rue La Fayette, where there were no targets of military significance. But there were targets here of importance for the would-be painter Fritz Krupp. Picasso’s compatriot Mañach had let him stay in a room on Boulevard de Clichy in 1901. Then, in 1903, the painter of the smutty Les Demoiselles d‘Avignon (that was Krupp’s opinion of the canvas, which he dubbed ’The Brothel’) moved to Boulevard Voltaire, and finally in 1904 to the most noted address in Rue Ravignan, the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’. That building was completely insignificant for German High Command, but not for the history of modern painting, so the Zeppelin bombardier endeavoured to find it and destroy it by his own hand.
Now, in 1914, it seemed the hour of reckoning had finally come: the chance for him to get back at the colours on the pictures of his classmates Cézanne and Derain, at the indecent figures on Picasso’s canvasses, and at the uncouth repute of the hobo hack painters from the east. Paris was his! The whole night belonged to him! He just needed to take good aim at the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’ . . . but it wasn’t easy to locate and destroy an ordinary, two-storey thatched cabin on the steep terrain of Montmartre, especially since strong winds were always blowing above that hill. Therefore he often reluctantly agreed for the Zeppelin to turn south. The target? Montparnasse, of course. En route, Fritz threw the odd bomb at the government buildings by the Seine, just so he’d have something to report to his superiors, and then he demanded that the LZ-37 continue south. ‘To Montmartre!’ he shouted from the gondola. Here Fritz mercilessly rained bombs down on the painters’ colony La Ruche in Rue du Maine, where the ateliers of the itinerant professors of painting were, and on the colony Falguière where Modigliani worked.
What he actually ended up hitting is a different story. The bombs mostly fell into the brambles and weeds between the buildings, but up in the sky it all looked otherwise to Fritz. Every night he felt he had put a spanner in the works of modern painting and levelled its rakish habitats, so he always returned to base in La Fère satisfied and wrote a report on the sortie in the operations log, describing the great damage inflicted on the enemy although there was virtually none. That was one painter-bombardier’s idea of fighting the war. But he