Leonard Tauber planned that his hotel de voyageur should cater for discerning visitors from all over the world. In his 1910 brochure Hotel Majestic Paris he wrote “…on peut affirmer que toutes les familles aisées, de passage à Paris, y trouveront des avantages qu’elles ne peuvent rencontrer dans aucun autre hôtel de premier ordre.” [1]
All these benefits were to be offered at “a very reasonable price” and with the promise that “…tout y a été conçu pour que le voyageur y trouve le maximum de joie et de confort.”[2]
Tauber also saw his hotel as being “le plus americain et le plus parisien des hotels”[3], and between 1908 and 1914 a steady stream of American guests arrived in Paris via Cherbourg to reward his vision, at least until the nature of the hotel’s visitors suddenly changed.
Six years after the Majestic opened a wealthy American banker called Edward Toland arrived at the hotel from the United States via Liverpool. His journey had been made by ship – but in steerage on a freighter – and the last thing he found at Tauber’s Parisian palace was joy and comfort.
Toland first set eyes on Paris in the early dusk of September 1914. In his book The Aftermath of Battle with the Red Cross in France he described his journey through the heart of the city. “Paris was deserted,” he wrote. “Nearly all the stores were closed and the windows boarded up. When I turned into the Avenue de L’Opera it was empty – just one cart between the Opera and the Louvre, and a not a soul on the sidewalks.”
Toland had been educated at Princeton and had spent four years working as an engineer before becoming a banker in 1912. The onset of the First World War had put the banking business on hold and Toland decided to travel east from New York “…to see the excitement and the French people in war-time”.
If Toland’s attitude seems callous he was, in practice, anything but. This was a young man swept into the streams of war who soon found himself working among gravely wounded men whose only possible comfort was often somebody to hold their hand as they died.
Within a few hours of arriving in Paris Toland was introduced to Mrs. F, a hospital superintendent. She described for Toland how the Parisian officials did not want wounded men brought to the city, but they were coming anyway. She described how hundreds of injured soldiers from the front in Flanders were lying on filthy straw in railway sidings as officials debated their fate, fearing that Paris may yet fall into a state of siege if the Germans advance south or that the sight of gravely injured soldiers would damage morale.
The solution, for some, had been private hospitals in hotels initiated by wealthy individuals and supported by the Red Cross. Mrs. F offered to take Toland to one such facility. “She was on her way to the Hotel Majestic Hospital on the Avenue Kleber near the Arc de Triomphe, and I walked over with her to see it.”
The popular British television series Downton Abbey, set in a palatial stately home (Highclere Castle in real life) had a series of episodes in its second season when the Abbey’s ground floor rooms are turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded British soldiers. Although there are some badly injured men in the abbey the atmosphere of these scenes is reminiscent of a tea party.
There are photographs of the Hotel Majestic hospital that suggest a similar atmosphere prevailed in Paris. Nurses and doctors with a well-to-do appearance pose in starched uniforms alongside men who seem destined to make a full recovery. And the hotel had its share of girls with an aristocratic background. One such was the daughter of the Earl of Rosslyn, Lady Angela Selina Bianca St. Clair-Erskine Forbes, but what she found at the Majestic was no TV soap opera.
“At Dieppe we were met by a friend of Sarah Wilson’s, who gave us heartrending accounts of the conditions for the accommodation of the French wounded,” she wrote in her book Memories. “It was pitch-dark when we arrived in Paris. I went to the Hotel Majestic, where the hospital was installed and where I was to have accommodation. Supper was ready for us, and we went into the barely-lit passages through smells of chloroform and iodoform, into what was the staff’s mess-room.”
Lady Forbes provides a vivid picture of how the war had diminished the Majestic’s service and appearance.
“I was hungry, but I could not eat the very nasty looking food that was produced for me,” she wrote. “The mess-room was only just outside the ward, which was the big ball-room in the Majestic, and groans could be distinctly heard. The chandelier had only about two lights in it and they were thickly shaded, making the figures in the beds all round look more terrible than any ghost. It was with a sigh of relief that I at last crept up, with the light of a tallow dip, the great gloomy staircase into a small apartment which was to be mine whilst I was at the Majestic.”
Toland discovered a similar brutal reality on his first night at the Majestic.
“They had twelve patients, their first lot, who had been brought in from Montereau the night before,” he wrote. “Just as we arrived, a half dozen more came in an ambulance and I helped carry them in. As soon as this was done, I was detailed to hold a delirious Prussian officer who had a bad head wound. He was just coming out of the anaesthetic and had to have someone beside him to keep him still; they had recently removed some three ounces of rotten brains. The patient in the bed on the other side, who had just been brought in, and who was not yet undressed and washed, was wounded in the leg and, like the majority, was reeking with dysentery and septic pus. The Prussian officer was groaning terribly and rolling his eyes so that I could only see the whites of them.
“I am not accustomed to this sort of thing and in five minutes I was groggy and the first thing I knew, I had fainted. When I had got my head clear, I took a walk for a few minutes in the air, had a drink of brandy and then came back. A nurse showed me how to keep from fainting, by putting my head down between my knees and holding it there until the blood comes back; this I did at intervals throughout the day.
“Three of our men have wounds in the head and why any of them are still alive, is more than I can understand. One German soldier has been shot through the top and back of the head, the bullet coming out underneath the right eye, destroying its sight. All that side of his face is chocolate colored. I should not think he could live through the night. A Frenchman has a sabre cut across the top of his head, which has gone into the skull three inches. He is very restless but quite conscious.
“I left the hospital at seven o’clock in the evening to go home and get some sleep, as I had been up in the car all night, after having been told that if I came there the next morning, there would be plenty for me to do.”
The following day Toland returned to find more carnage and to discover that the Majestic’s public rooms (most of which are now the Peninsula’s restaurants) had become a charnel house full of dead, dying or delirious men.
“Arrived at the hospital where I met Mrs. F., who said she had been called to Limoges to report on conditions there,” Toland wrote on September 15, when he saw 7 people die in the hotel. “The Frenchman who had the sabre cut in his head had died about fifteen minutes before I came in. The hospital is in charge of Dr. G., an Englishman. There has been no attempt at organization as yet. Nobody has had any particular job assigned to him, no one knows what he or she is to do, and there is general confusion and disorder. The patients’ dinner was very badly managed, with the head nurse running around looking after detail, instead of superintending the job.”
Toland especially praises the bravery of the French soldiers, fighting an enemy that had become an occupying force, with all the fear of their country being overwhelmed that would imply. The American noted his encounter with one French soldier at the Majestic who displayed exceptional courage and sang-froid despite terrifying injuries.
“He had the largest assortment of wounds that I have seen yet,” wrote Toland. “He had been thrown violently against something. The right arm had been almost completely severed at the wrist… and three fingers were gone from the other hand. His scalp wound proved to be superficial and the skull not damaged. The arm had to be amputated below the elbow. The man was French, a fine looking and well-educated fellow, although a private. He got out of bed and on to the stretcher himself and talked to us cheerfully, although he must have been in terrible pain. I asked him if he had not knocked over a cavalry charge, but he said, “Non, un obus seulement.”[4]
Laurence Binyon takes up Toland’s account in his book For Dauntless France, which offers a comprehensive account of Britain’s aid to the wounded in France between 1914 and 1918.
“These were nightmare times,” he writes. “Here was a country suddenly called to fight for its life and to care for its wounded at the same time. French, English, Belgian and German wounded were brought indiscriminately to the Majestic and the head surgeon would frequently operate on five or six cases during the night after twenty operations during the day.”
A British doctor, Leslie Haden-Guest, founded the Hotel Majestic Hospital and some accounts say he was a “millionaire socialist” who rented the hotel and converted it to a hospital as an act of charity. The real situation is muddied. We know that Haden-Guest served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II, winning a Military Cross. He was the founder of the Anglo-French Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St John. After the war he became the Labour Member of Parliament for Southwark North and went on to enter the House of Lords on 2nd February 1950 as Baron Haden-Guest, serving as a Lord-in-Waiting to the King. He chose the Majestic because of the size of the hotel’s public rooms and his staff at the outset was all British, hand picked and transported to Paris by boat and train.
Binyon was impressed by Haden-Guest. He described the hospital as being possessed of “hundred beds, and a highly efficient staff”, but Toland took a different view, especially as the carnage turned the Hotel Majestic into a halfway house between a hospital and a mortuary, with the dead bodies in Tauber’s beautiful apartments staining the air and floors with blood and sepses.
“We are short of men this afternoon and there are a great many operations necessary,” he wrote. “We started in at two in the afternoon. The first operation was amputating the French captain’s leg below the knee. The foot was entirely black and there was no chance to save it. No. 1 in Ward 1 is dead at last. The poor fellow had two mitrailleuse bullets through his head, and how he managed to keep alive for four days since we have had him, is incredible. He was so nice while he was still conscious and kept apologizing to us for the trouble he gave.
“The next two operations were on Scots from the Cameron Highlanders. Both of them had terrible elbows, although not so septic as usual. One man had lost all the flesh on one side and the other had his elbow-joint and forearm splintered and broken in several places. The bullet which struck this last man had broken into several pieces and had torn the arm all to bits.
“To-night we brought in a Frenchman who had a severe gunshot wound in the back of his head. He was quite delirious. In some way the bullet has stimulated the part of his brain that he used when he was a child of about five. We operated on him at one o’clock this morning, trephining the skull. Joll got about a teaspoonful of splintered bone out of his brain, which had been driven down from one to two inches, but said it was too dangerous to try to remove the bullet, although he located it with his telephone probe. How he can go digging around in the brain the way he does without killing the patients, seems marvellous. He says there is not much chance for this man recovering his senses, and that he will probably be a permanent imbecile.”
As Toland watched the death toll mount inside the Majestic he decided the property needed more structure if they were to be effective as saving lives and protecting the sanity of the hospital staff. He may have been impressed by a visit he paid to the Hotel Astoria, which had become a Japanese military hospital, staffed by Japanese doctors and nurses and equipped entirely by Japanese manufacturers of medical equipment. Apparently the Japanese decided not to fight in the First World War, but supported the Allies by sending medical teams to free up British and French resources for the war effort. Toland’s encounter with Japanese efficiency convinced him to act.
“We need some system here badly,” he wrote on September 24th 1914. “The nurses may be very good technical nurses, but not one of them knows the first thing about organisation or management. After half a dozen lunches where everything was in confusion — three people doing one job and no people doing two jobs, — I thought it was about time to outline the work a bit myself.”
After Toland took charge of some of the hotel-cum-hospital he found himself increasingly at odds with the Majestic’s skeleton staff, left behind to protect the splendour of Tauber’s creation as best they could.
“Our relations with the management of this hotel are decidedly unpleasant,” he wrote on September 26 1914. “I am quite sure that the only reason the hotel was given as a hospital was as a sort of insurance proposition. When the Germans were at the gates of Paris and their entrance to the city imminent, a hotel containing wounded soldiers, especially wounded Germans, would be less liable to be looted and damaged. Now that there is no chance of the Germans getting in here, I think they would jolly well like to kick us all out.”
Toland seems to have been especially at odds with a man who in peacetime would have devoted himself to making hotel visitors happy. Not so in wartime.
“The French manager is an impossible little fellow, and has been given instructions by someone else to cut down expenses to the last cent,” wrote Toland. “He runs about having electric lights turned off, and hiding cups, plates, knives, forks, etc, and making it generally uncomfortable for us. I had to go out this morning and buy three dozen drinking glasses for the patients in our ward; it saved time to get them that way rather than fight with these people.”
Although Toland dismissed the possibility of a German occupation of Paris it is likely the staff at the Majestic were not so sanguine. The city was still being attacked with depressing frequency and the day after Toland wrote his tetchy entry about the Majestic’s manager the war came unpleasantly close.
(Head Surgeon Dr. Joll in center)
“Four bombs were dropped on Paris at noon to-day,” wrote Toland. “One of them landed in the Avenue du Trocadero, about 300 yards from the hospital, and blew a little girl’s leg off. It also came quite close to Mr. Herrick, the American Ambassador.”
Zeppelins flying above 10,000 feet dropped the munitions and they struck fear in the Parisian population. It was not a good time to be an hotelier in Paris. The city was in state of suspended animation.
“I left the [Majestic] hospital at seven o’clock in the evening to go home and get some sleep,” wrote Toland in early September 1914. “The Metro was not running, so I walked from the Etoille to the Opera, where I lived. There was hardly a soul in the streets; hardly a light visible. The Place de la Concorde was as dark and still as a country churchyard, save for one huge search light on the top of the Hotel de Crillon, which swept the sky for German aeroplanes. A rather sharp contrast to the Paris of last year.”
Relations between the hospital volunteers and the hotel’s staff continued to deteriorate as October dawned and almost resulted in the outbreak of hostilities within the building.
“I had breakfast at the Hotel de Empire this morning, as the hospital one is irregular and bad with one waiter for fourteen men, and twenty-five nurses,” wrote Toland. “The other morning we came in and found only six cups on the table. Upon asking why there were no more, we were informed that the management had not left out any more. It appears that they had set aside one cup each for the patients, and one each for the staff, etc, and that some of the cups were mislaid. Williams ran and got the manager and told him he would punch his head, if he didn’t get us other cups in five minutes.”
It seems easy to take Toland’s side in this dispute but the hotel’s position must have been extremely difficult. With just six years of earnings under its belt the Majestic was facing an indefinite period of closure and requisition. The money invested in fixtures and fittings was making a nil return and the expensive spaces created on the public floors were being battered by the ghastly routines of a hospital-cum-mortuary, where death was all too frequently the outcome of any case.
“There were four deceased on Sunday,” wrote Toland of the Majestic’s death toll on September 21 1914. “A Prussian; the man with the awful leg in Ward 1, and two others whom we had just taken in and who were about dead when they arrived. One of them died a few hours after having his leg amputated at the hip. There really was not much use in doing it; the leg was so rotten that you could nearly have pulled it off with your hands; besides that, the poor fellow had fearful dysentery and had become so reduced that he looked like pictures of people in India who have died from famine.
“We have another bad case. A young English sergeant with a piece of his spine shot away. He has been married only six months and his wife is in Paris and at the hospital now. It is very pathetic. He cannot live, and to hear them talking about what they will do when he gets better, almost makes one cry. There is no use telling her that he is going to die.”
Surprisingly the Majestic only spent five months as a refuge for the injured and by January 1915 it was decided that Paris was fully provided with hospitals and Haden-Guest, along with the Red Cross, decided it would be more productive to work elsewhere.
The Majestic was cleared, cleaned and opened for business again at the beginning of 1916, although the war was never far from its doors or the lives of its principal characters. Many of the hotel’s staff was conscripted to the front and substantial numbers did not return. There is no memorial at the Peninsula Paris to the dozens of men who died there in 1914, nor is their any recognition of the men and women who battled so valiantly within the hotel to save the terribly injured young men. Maybe the tragedies of that era are too great to be recalled, but it must be noted here that one of the most profound tragedies afflicted Armand Sibien, the architect of the Majestic and the man who created the building that the Peninsula has so expensively renovated.
In 1914 Armand’s son Pierre Sibien, also an architect, was “gloriously killed in Alsace” as reported in Le Figaro. In the same year his other son Maurice was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans. Armand himself, who fought so hard to make Tauber’s Majestic vision a reality, died in February 1918, nine months before the war came to an end and while his sole surviving son was still being held by the enemy. In Hong Kong, home to the Peninsula’s head quarters, the local Cantonese culture is famous for its belief in “angry ghosts”, those who haunt the space where they were cruelly and prematurely separated from their lives. Armand Sibien and the other soldiers who died in the Majestic have every right to be angry ghosts, and it might be wise of the Peninsula to occasionally burn a paper offering in their honor.
On November 11th 1918 the war came to an end. The Majestic’s owners hoped the hotel would return to the prosperity of the pre-war era. Their optimism did not last long. By January 1919 the hotel was again under occupation and its staff cast out upon the street.
[1] We can say that all wealthy families passing through Paris, will have benefits that they cannot find at other hotels of the first rank.
[2] Everything has been designed to ensure that the traveler finds maximum joy and comfort
[3] The most American and most Parisien of hotels
[4] No, it was just the shells.