Le Havre because of a shortage of workers for unloading the ships. The arrival of the first British convoy of food at Les Halles sparked a riot and pillaging, "while for seven hours the police seemed powerless to intervene". Thirty thousand Prussian, Bavarian and Saxon troops held a brief victory parade in Paris on March 1, 1871 and Bismarck honored the armistice by sending trainloads of food into the city. The German troops departed after two days to take up temporary encampments to the east of the city, to be withdrawn from there when France paid the agreed war indemnity. While Parisians scrubbed the streets "polluted" by the triumphal entry, no serious incidents occurred during the short and symbolic occupation of the city. This was in part because the Germans had avoided areas such as Belleville, where hostility was reportedly high. Air mail Balloon mail was the only means by which communications from the besieged city could reach the rest of France. The use of balloons to carry mail was first proposed by the photographer and balloonist Felix Nadar, who had established the grandiosely titled No. 1 Compagnie des Aérostatiers, with a single balloon, the Neptune, at its disposal, to perform tethered ascents for observation purposes. However the Prussian encirclement of the city made this pointless, and on 17 September Nadar wrote to the Council for the Defence of Paris proposing the use of balloons for communication with the outside world: a similar proposal had also been made by the balloonist Eugène Godard. The first balloon launch was carried out on 23 September, using the Neptune, and carried of mail in addition to the pilot. After a three-hour flight it landed at Craconville from Paris. Following this success a regular mail service was established, with a rate of 20 centimes per letter. Two workshops to manufacture balloons were set up, one under the direction of Nadar in the Elysée-Montmartre dance-hall (later moved to the Gare du Nord), and the other under the direction of Godard in the Gare d'Orleans. Around 66 balloon flights were made, including one that accidentally set a world distance record by ending up in Norway. The vast majority of these succeeded: only five were captured by the Prussians, and three went missing, presumably coming down in the Atlantic or Irish Sea. The number of letters carried has been estimated at around 2.5 million. Some balloons also