The most immediate manifestation of that moral dilemma, which would trouble the occupied people of northern France for the next four years, was how to react to the scores of British soldiers left behind in the retreat. At Vendhuile, just hours before the Germans arrived, the mayor spotted a group of British soldiers drinking in a bar and could not suppress the suspicion that ‘they wanted to be caught’. In Hargicourt the deputy mayor reported an English soldier who had hidden in woods by the road into the village who ‘had the audacity to open fire, as a despairing gesture’, when the enemy columns arrived, and then ran to hide in the nearest barn. When German troops began bayoneting the straw, he emerged and surrendered.
Suddenly deprived of orders and a clear line of command, the lost soldiers reacted in different ways. Since the British military command had not anticipated any such eventuality, the rules governing what a soldier should do if trapped behind the lines were vague. Some gave themselves up. Others wandered blindly around the countryside, avoiding every human being and hoping for miraculous deliverance. Some literally went to ground, like Private Patrick Fowler of No 1 troop, A Squadron, of the 11th Hussars, who ‘rode about aimlessly’ for several days before abandoning his horse and concealing himself in a wood near Bertry. He would spend the entire winter there, living off whatever he could kill or uproot, as the war continued to the south. Another soldier, nineteen-year-old David Cruikshank of the Ist Scottish Rifles, resorted to transvestism, with the help of Julie-Célestine Baudhuin, a local woman in Le Câteau, who procured for him a wig and clothes. Cruikshank was fresh-faced enough to pass for a woman, but his Highlander’s stride would be a giveaway. He solved the problem by tying his ankles together loosely with a piece of string.
Some soldiers chose to throw themselves on the mercy of strangers. Some were turned away, but most were hidden in cellars, attics, haylofts and outhouses.
The soil was settling over John Sligo’s grave in Villeret cemetery when Florency Dessenne, village mason and professional tobacco smuggler, opened his back door to find a dishevelled creature on the step. The soldier had four days’ growth of beard, a bloody bandage around his arm, and spoke reasonably good French. Holding the soldier’s hand was Florency’s seven-year-old daughter, Marthe, who explained that she had found him under a bush while she was out collecting dandelion leaves from the fields by the Hargicourt road.
As Marie-Thérèse, Florency’s pregnant wife, joined her husband on the doorstep she exclaimed: ‘My God, Marthe. What have you brought upon us? This is going to mean trouble.’
Robert Digby was swiftly ushered inside and into the presence of the widow Dessenne, Marie Coulette, probably the most formidable woman in Villeret. A compact, bullet-eyed woman of sixty-five with a personality as sharp as a hatchet, Marie Coulette was the undisputed power in the Dessenne households – the two adjacent buildings on the rue d’En Bas, with granary and outhouses, and a third single-storey brick building on the opposite side of the road. This was Marie Coulette’s tiny empire, where she ruled with extreme vigour and periodic explosions of violence, over three generations of the family: her son Florency and daughter-in-law Marie-Thérèse; her brother Léon Recolet and his wife Berthe, her daughter-in-law Eugénie (whose husband Jules was away at the front), at least eight grandchildren and a German shepherd dog. The smaller members of the tribe took pains to stay as far as possible from Marie Coulette, whose sudden outbursts of affection could be as disconcerting as her temper. ‘I always tried to avoid being embraced by my grandmother,’ one of the children recalled. ‘She had a moustache, which was very prickly.’ In the words of another relative: ‘Marie Coulette was the matriarch, the clan chief, with a temperament to match. Everyone liked her, and everyone was scared of her. She was always willing to lend a hand, but you did what she said. One word from Marie Coulette was enough.’
One word was what she now issued as the exhausted Englishman was ordered to sit beside the stove. The grandchildren clustered and stared at the soldier, while Marie Coulette prepared food and Marie-Thérèse dressed his wound. Florency insisted that the Englishman stay, at least until his injured arm had properly healed, but Digby declined. Restored by the food and warmth, he thanked Marie Coulette and the others in barely accented French. At dusk he struck out into the countryside again, this time heading north-west, perhaps hoping to slip past the right flank of the advancing Germans and eventually reach the coast.
A dozen pairs of Dessenne eyes watched him as he headed off across the fields. Among them was a particularly large and arresting pair belonging to Claire Dessenne, the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of Marie Coulette, the daughter of Eugénie and, by common agreement, the prettiest girl in Villeret. It is quite possible that Digby, exhausted and on the run, did not fully register Claire’s presence during his first, dramatic appearance in the Dessenne homestead; but equally it is impossible to imagine that if he did see her, he would have quickly forgotten her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fugitives
Private Digby crept through a land on which a brittle peace had settled. Although Uhlans no longer roamed the lanes, a few German soldiers had been left behind to guard sites of strategic importance and maintain order in what was now occupied territory, and fresh troops continued to stream down the main roads heading towards the battle front.
Digby’s actions over the next few days followed no discernible pattern. He might sensibly have turned south, to follow his retreating comrades, or struck out towards the coast, or gone north into Belgium and Holland as others had done, but instead of continuing on his north-west bearing he went to earth, and waited. The rolling land, dotted with copses and latticed with rivers and streams, offered ideal cover, and the locals later commented on how well Digby appeared to understand the obscure sustenance and contours of the Picardy countryside. During the day he slept and hid in thickets; only at night did he venture into the open, avoiding the villages and larger roads, darting under cover at the first hint of danger. When the food the Dessennes had given him ran out, he began gathering wild fruit and vegetables from the fields. The hedgerows teemed with raucous life: robins, larks and nightingales sang as if the battle had never been, and would never return. Moving from one concealing grove to another, Digby shared his hiding places with deer, rabbits and wild boar. And creatures like himself.
In the Grand Priel woods that lay beyond Villeret, Digby stumbled upon Privates Thorpe, Donohoe and Martin, standing exactly where the French cavalryman Bastien had left them, too terrified to quit the protecting shelter of Theillier’s woods. Perhaps men who had spent so long in uniform felt, wrongly, greater safety in numbers. The woods were so close to Villeret that even lighting a fire would invite notice. So, like some unlikely Pied Piper, Digby urged the trio to follow him. That night they slipped out of the woods and pushed north, in precisely the wrong direction. For three days, their anxieties steadily rising, they moved from one patch of woods to the next, avoiding every human being and praying for deliverance. Starving and filthy, expecting at any moment to be captured or killed, they adopted a near-feral existence.
Near Walincourt, a farm hand and his dog discovered the men hiding in the undergrowth. Recognising them as fugitive soldiers he led them to a safer patch of thick woodland outside the village. Their uniforms were clearly a serious liability: in battledress they were instantly identifiable, not just to enemy troops, but also to over-inquisitive locals; but without their khaki they ran the risk of being treated as spies if captured, and executed.
The farm hand agreed to hide their uniforms and later returned with civilian clothing. But it seems he also spread word of the men’s whereabouts for within hours more stragglers from the Mons retreat began to emerge to join Digby’s party – directed there by locals anxious to help, or possibly eager to move such human liabilities off their hands.
The first soldiers to arrive were Harry May, a private from the Hampshire Regiment, and Willie O’Sullivan, another Irishman. Then Jack Hardy, a raw-boned Lancashire boy, presented himself acc
ompanied by another young soldier whose age, eighteen, became preserved in local memory, but not his name. A few days later a further Frenchman appeared in the copse, delivering to the band one Corporal John Edwards, a little food, and some encouraging news: the Germans had been pushed back from Péronne and the town was once again in French hands, offering a break in the German line and the possibility of escape and return to their units. After a brief conference the soldiers, now numbering nine in all, struggled to their feet and ‘set off to try to reach the gap’. Once again they were in the open, a desolate troop of uniformed refugees searching for the battle line.
By September 1914 the opposing armies, having locked in a wrestler’s clinch across the River Marne, were now staggering back towards Villeret. The German army that had marched through Le Câtelet chanting ‘Nach Paris’, whose soldiers had been promised they would be ‘home before the leaves fall’, was now itself in retreat. Above the River Aisne, the German army dug in and fought back. Duelling artillery could be heard once more south of Le Câtelet. ‘The French are here,’ the children shouted. ‘Those are French guns.’ Léon Lege, the town notary who had suffered the indignity of being held hostage just days before, now ‘wept with joy’ as an advance party of French troops arrived in the village and the German sentries melted away. ‘It’s over,’ the French officer told him. ‘You won’t see those Germans again, except for stragglers, and all you have to do is give them a kick in the arse.’
The military situation became all but unreadable as the front line lurched back and forth. This was warfare as fluid and erratic as the coming trench battle would be static and predictable. When news spread that Péronne had been retaken by French troops, scores of Frenchmen of fighting age and some army stragglers moved swiftly to cross the lines and link up with the allied armies – exactly what Private Digby and his band were now attempting to do but without the benefit of local knowledge. With victory and liberation seemingly imminent most of the civilian population and the concealed remnants of the British army hunkered down and waited, assuming the battle would pass through and on, as it had done before. Few expected a world war to be waged in their back gardens.
On 16 September, as the village mayor later reported, ‘Villeret became French once again’, and a French ‘cavalry division composed of chasseurs, cuirassiers, dragoons, cyclists and machine gunners’ surged up the hill from Hargicourt into the village. ‘It was a day of celebration.’ Had Robert Digby chosen to remain in Villeret, enjoying Marie Coulette’s hospitality and her granddaughter’s gaze, he would have been able to rejoin the allied forces and this story would be very different. Indeed, it would not exist at all.
Villeret’s moment of elation was short-lived, however, for the battle line that had flexed northwards in a precarious arc was now bending in the opposite direction; the momentum that had brought the French troops back to Villeret and Le Câtelet slowed, stopped, and then abruptly reversed, as a flood of German soldiers poured down from the north, turning the tide once more. The French horsemen vanished from Villeret as suddenly as they had arrived. On 21 September a French machine-gun troop dug in at Cologne Farm, on the ridge above the village and opened up briefly at a squadron of mounted Uhlans. But an hour later they, too, had packed up and retreated. As the French gunners sped down the mill road, ‘there was an exchange of fire with the German horsemen who were following from a distance. Two animals were left dead on the ground.’ The fickle war then evaporated once more. The people of Villeret would not see their compatriots in uniform again for four years.
On the same day, Private Digby and the others found themselves on the banks of the River Escaut, a tributary of the Somme, with the sounds of battle clearly audible. Their situation was by now becoming desperate. Thorpe was so weak he could hardly walk and a wound to Hardy’s arm showed signs of infection. The soldiers were soaked, disorientated and beginning to suffer from malnutrition. They stood staring at the river; swollen by overnight rain, too fast flowing to cross. They would have to wait until the river had subsided, Digby concluded. ‘We were trapped, and took refuge in a wood, in the quarry at Hargival, a little way north of the river.’
Surrender must, at some stage, have entered their minds, offering at least the chance to eat and then sleep without fear of being woken by a bayonet in the stomach. For days they had eaten nothing but wild fruit and raw field crops, sleeping in ditches and under briars. Digby had now been on the run for more than three weeks, yet he was back almost to the point where he had started, with Villeret to the south, the British and French armies just a few miles beyond that, and the German army massing in between.
As the group waited frantically in the shelter of the quarry, a few hundred yards away a woman was quietly tending her horse.
Jeanne Magniez, the thirty-three-year-old mistress of Hargival, was not conventionally beautiful, being heavy-boned and masculine in dress, but she left many dazed by the force of her personality. She loved her husband, Georges; she loved her Afghan hound; she loved her home, the charming estate lying some four miles north of Villeret (and not to be confused with neighbouring Hargicourt) with its forests and lush fields grazed by Flemish cattle and Georges’s herd of prize sheep; she loved the warm walled garden and the orchards sweeping down to the river. But most of all, Jeanne Magniez loved horses. ‘For her, human beings were divided into people who rode and people who did not; horses were sacred’, and she treated people as she treated her horses, with gentle firmness, secure in the knowledge that there was not one, of either species, she could not render docile. Her vast photograph album was a precise index of her affections: there were several photographs of her moustachioed husband, scores showing the various dogs she had known, and horse pictures by the hundred.
From earliest childhood Jeanne had spent at least a part of every day on horseback, and her closest human friendships had been made in the saddle, with Georges, and with her friend and confidante Anne de Becquevort, whose father ran the brasserie in Vendhuile. Anne had been born with a displaced hip, and when she reached the age of fifteen her father was advised by a local doctor that she must ride side-saddle in order to rectify the problem. It was arranged that Anne would ride with Jeanne. The exercise did nothing for Mademoiselle de Becquevort’s hip, but made the two young women into the closest of friends. They became a familiar sight of the locality, trotting down the wooded lanes around Hargival, hacking across the plateau above Villeret, or watering their horses at the village trough in Le Câtelet.
Jeanne Delacourt was twenty-eight when she married Georges Magniez in 1909, a match of love but also of dynastic logic, for the Delacourts of Gouy and the Magniez family of Hargival were joint pillars of the rural gentry, hardly as rich as François Theillier with his industrial money and flashy tastes, but in an indefinable way grander. After five years of marriage, there was still no sign of any children in the Magniez household, but if Jeanne minded, she was so busy with her dogs, home, husband and horses that nobody noticed. Local gossips thought that Jeanne was a ‘racy’ type; she smoked cigarettes, drove an automobile without gloves on, and treated everybody with exactly the same direct, penetrating and faintly lofty manner, usually from the saddle. She was tall and striking, whereas her husband was small and shy, with a diffident manner that belied a passionately romantic soul. There were many, in fact, who said that Jeanne was the real squire of Hargival.
Georges Magniez had enlisted as an officer in the 41st Artillery Regiment on the eve of war, and left Hargival for the front within hours of mobilisation. Georges pledged to write and Jeanne promised to exercise Flirt, his magnificent thoroughbred, whom they had nicknamed ‘Son of Steel’. As the names of their favourite animals suggest, Jeanne and her husband were enthusiastic Anglophiles. Jeanne had heard the first gunfire over at Le Câtelet as the German troops arrived; she had watched the refugees fleeing south, and the weary columns of retreating British infantry and the wagons loaded with wounded men. From Vendhuile, the nearest village to the Hargival estate, her se
rvants brought horrific tales of German brutality: the shooting of Oscar Dupuis and Madame Lemaire-Liénard and the way the ‘notables’ of Le Câtelet had been taken hostage, beaten and mistreated. The equinomaniac Jeanne was particularly outraged to learn that horses requisitioned by the French government at the outbreak of war and gathered at Le Câtelet, including several from the stables of Hargival, had since been appropriated by the enemy. Capricious and undefined, the war seemed to seep into every corner, and yet it was nowhere.
On 17 September, on the road adjacent to the Hargival estate, a German staff car was ambushed by a squad of French cavalrymen, led by one Lieutenant Bourbon-Chalus, and four Germans were killed. On the plateau where the Magniez sheep grazed above Hargival, German machine-gunners exchanged fire with a patrol of French chasseurs on the valley side. But even as the war raged, a semblance of normal life continued. A woman from Vendhuile trudged up the hill with drinks for the French soldiers, as if at a sporting event. Nearby, a lone farm worker, ‘taking advantage of the fine weather’, continued his rhythmic scything to the echo of heavy gunfire: ‘The battle and the harvest carried on side by side.’
Anyone on horseback ran the risk of being mistaken for a soldier and shot by one side or the other, and the more cautious inhabitants stayed indoors. Jeanne Magniez, undaunted, was out on her daily ride on Flirt when she discovered the British soldiers huddled miserably in the woods on her property. ‘It couldn’t really be called a hiding place, for the quarry was virtually open to the sky,’ she later recorded. She cantered back to the mansion and returned within an hour, bringing blankets and food. Not for the last time, the men hailed Jeanne as their ‘guardian angel’.
‘For several days I brought them provisions, since they had not a scrap to eat, as I tried to work out how to get them to Péronne. I searched in vain for a way through,’ she wrote. On 23 September Péronne was finally retaken by German troops and ‘the door was slammed shut’.
A Foreign Field Page 5